Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything brought tears to my eyes. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize, this gracefully-written, moving novel brings together characters from Strout’s previous books, including Lucy Barton, a successful writer who moved from New York to Maine with her ex-husband William during the pandemic, and Olive Kitteridge, the cranky retired schoolteacher in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge.
Set in the small town of Crosby, Maine, Strout’s latest tells the stories of Maine natives as well as newcomers. Perhaps my favorite character is Bob Burgess, a lawyer who is Lucy’s best friend. An accusation of accidental patricide shaped his childhood. His older brother was responsible for the accident, but Bob, who is still confused about it, took the fall. In the course of the novel, Bob saves a gentle introvert, Matt, from a charge of matricide. Although Bob doesn’t think about it, he is saving himself as well as Matt.
There is almost a romance in this novel. A gentle love story unfolds during Lucy and Bob’s long walks. Will they become romantically involved, we wonder? They seldom touch each other and never kiss, because Bob is married to Margaret, a minister with whom he isn’t getting along at the moment, and Lucy is living with her ex-husband William, a self-centered, obsessive parasitologist. Lucy and Bob are loyal and reluctant to judge others, but if only…
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Then there’s grouchy Olive Kitteridge, the heroine of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge. Olive was a teacher in Crosby for many years. Now she is in her 90s, complains that her son hates her because he never visits, and laments the changes in the culture. But her best friend lives in a nearby retirement home, so she is not alone. Lucy enters her life, because Olive tells Bob she has a story to tell Lucy. Lucy refers to Olive’s fascinating stories of local people as “unrecorded lives.”
It could be said that the main theme of the book is unrecorded lives. There is a link between fiction and these unrecorded lives. Oral storytelling is different from writing, but how different is it really? Olive tells stories of tragedy, romance, fortitude, stoicism, and, occasionally, death. Lucy is the repository of these stories. Olive has chosen well.
Strout’s graceful, carefully-shaped sentences are a pleasure to read. She has won several prizes in the U.S., including the Pulitzer Prize, but the esteem of the Women’s Prize judges is another distinction. I hope she wins!
I love awards: the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and on and on. Every year I especially look forward to the Women’s Prize longlist. And this year it is unusual, because the judges are going in a pop direction. They are honoring pop fiction and borderline-genre fiction as well as literary novels.
Most of the books are available in the U.S., which means we can actually can find copies this year. I am a bit gobsmacked by the pop elements, though. Two have been American TV book club selections: an SF novel, The Ministry of Time (a Good Morning America selection), and The Dream Hotel (the current Read with Jenna selection), a literary dystopian novel. TV book clubs are influential, and the selections are usually excellent. I try to to read a few each year to keep up with pop culture. I don’t mean to be snobbish: I embrace pop. I admired The Dream Hotel and look forward to The Ministry of Time. N.B. Read with Jenna is the more literary of the two book clubs.
I never read the entire Women’s Prize longlist, as some bold readers do, but I am on my fourth longlisted book. That’s because they are such fast reads. I am halfway through Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally, a novel about a serious issue, the heroine’s attempts to deradicalize ISIS brides in a camp in Iraq. However, the narrator Nadia’s ironic voice, wry humor, and wit are a welcome relief from the tension. And in some ways, as unlikely as it sounds, Nadia reminds me of Sara Paretsky’s private detective, V. I. Warshawski.
I know, they should have nothing in common, but just look at their degrees and job history. Nadia has a Ph.D. in criminology, and struggles to find supporters of the deradicalization program at the camp in Iraq. She meets resistance among her colleagues and employees, who also are busy with their own programs. And so she does online research, i.e., detective work, in order to discover her colleagues’ interests and befriend them. She can do nothing without their contacts.
Now on to V. I. Warshawski. She is a policeman’s daughter who gave up practicing law to be a private detective. And because the first Warshawski mystery was published in 1982, she is now well-established in her job, though she still meets resistance, even among the police. And she stands up against corporations – very dangerous – as well as busting murderers and white collar criminals. At this point, she has a boyfriend, two dogs, and a paternal landlord. And I love her sense of humor.
Here’s what these two women have in common: both are brilliant and very intense, and delve into forbidden, dangerous territory, which even humor and friendship cannot always balance. And their lines of work are not entirely dissimilar. I recommend both writers.
Younis’s style is much simpler than the award-winning mystery writer, Sara Paretsky’s. Younis writes short sentences and funny dialogue, but so far it doesn’t have real depth.
Published in 2017
I am on a short break from Fundamentally. It’s a likable book, but I must get back to the classics or I’ll go insane.
Let me know if you have read other books on the list.
Winner of the first Orange Prize (Women’s Prize), 1996
I am a literary award freak. I love the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the P. G. Wodehouse Prize… And I have followed The Women’s Prize through three incarnations, since its inception in 1996. First it was the Orange Prize, sponsored by the Orange company, then the Bailey Prize, sponsored by Bailey Irish Cream, and finally The Women’s Prize, which has a fluctuating cast of sponsors.
I read the first Orange Prize winner before I knew of the award. I came across Helen Dunmore’s elegant novel A Spell of Winter, and subsequently read each of her books. When I learned about the Orange Prize, I managed to keep up with what I called finalists, i.e., the shortlist. But the longlist will be announced March 2 for super-fans.
I have read more of the shortlisted novels than I have the winners. I did not realize that until I looked up the winners list tonight. But here are three of my favorite Orange Prize-shortlisted books: Julia Blackburn’s The Leper’s Companion, shortlisted in 1998; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, shortlisted in 2000; and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, shortlisted in 2005.
And now for three novels that I consider Women’s Prize-worthy this year. Whether they’ll make the longlist I do not guarantee. Wait, have I just been named a special judge as a reader of classics in the U.S,? Oh, did I hear that wrong? Too bad! I was looking forward to wearing my Book Woman t-shirt and carrying my Villette bag.
And Here are Three for My 2025 Women’s Prize Wish List
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. The cold-blooded narrator of Creation Lake, a literary thriller, is a failed government spy, now working as an industrial spy. Sadie Smith, as she calls herself, has an eerily detached personality: she deals in manipulation, subterfuge, and betrayal. Her one saving grace: she loves and respects Bruno Lacombe’s lyrical emails to the radical Pascal Balmy, her employer’s targeted enemy. Bruno, Pascal’s former mentor, has given up politics to investigate the latest findings on Neanderthals, whose DNA in very small amounts, he says, may still survive in some humans. . Jessica Anthony’s The Most. In this spare, elegant novel, set on a November day in 1957, an ill-suited married couple reflect on emotional numbness. Kathleen, a former college tennis star, now a housewife, whimsically decides to swim in the apartment complex pool. Then she refuses to get out. Her gorgeous husband, Virgil, a failure in the insurance business, tries to hold it all together: he pleads with her to come inside and look after their sons, because he is required on Sundays to golf with his colleagues and network on the golf course. A melancholy book about marriage, failure, and regrets.
Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment. This brilliant novel, told partly in documents, goes back and forth in time between the 21st century and the 19th century. Thomas Hart, a newspaper columnist, has always been fascinated by Lowlands House, reputed to be haunted, where a woman disappeared in the 19th century. When a museum director gives him the woman’s diary, Thomas discovers that they shared a common interest: he is an amateur astronomer and she was an astronomer who discovered a comet. The third character is Grace Macaulay, whom he mentored when she was young, but she ran away to London after he interfered with her love affair with an unsuitable boy. Twenty years later Thomas and Grace reconnect, partly because of the woman who vanished from Lowlands House. But much goes on before everyone is reconciled.
Are you a Women’s Prize fan? Which is your favorite winner? Mine is the first winner, Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter. I also recommend Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
The Women’s Prize, formerly the Orange Prize, announced its longlist recently.
I am not one of those faithful award junkies who read every book on every prize longlist and then reread those that make the shortlist. I have tried that in the past and found it wearying, because readers have wildly different tastes, and mine do not always coincide with the judges.
I try to read one or two of the longlisted books every year, and have discovered some brilliant books that way. And so I found myself drawn to Kate Grenville’s longlisted novel, Restless Dolly Maunder, because I have long meant to read Grenville, who won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection.
This spare novel, and by spare I mean stripped-to-the-bone, is a short, fast read. Your reaction will doubtless depend on your attitude to the spare style. Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes I wanted more detail, but I like the concept. I recommend that you begin with the last chapter, “Grandma, ” which is really an Afterword, but could be read as an introduction. Grenville explains that this novel is the story of her grandmother, based on conversations with Grenville’s mother, parts of her mother’s memoir, old photos, and Australian history.
“Grandma” gave a new context to the whole of the novel. I was particularly shaken by a paragraph about Grenville’s mum trying to understand why her mother, Dolly, never loved her.
In her own last days, Mum asked again the question she’d so often come back to in talking about her childhood: Why did my mother never love me? I sat by her bed in the hospital and had no answer. I can see that Mum’s question came out of her experience, but the answer to it had to be found in Dolly’s. In a way this book is an attempt, after all this time, to come up with an answer to Mum’s painful question. Perhaps it’s also a different answer to the one Grandma asked me.
And so Grenville imagines the life of her grandmother Dolly, beginning with her struggles on a hardscrabble farm in Australia. Bright Dolly wants to be a teacher, and though her teacher recommends that she go to a teacher’s college, her father will not allow it. And there is no way off the farm for Dolly, except through marriage, so she marries Bert, a charming young man who is chronically unfaithful. She longed to marry Jim Murphy, but he is a Catholic, and will not intermarry with a Protestant. Dolly is thwarted by convention on all sides. So Bert and Dolly move to another hardscrabble farm, but one cannot fight the droughts, storms, and locusts, and they never get ahead. In addition to the stress of farming, Dolly is an unhappy mother with three children, only one of whom she likes, the youngest, Max.
Dolly is cold and mean-spirited, but she finally takes charge and yanks them off the farm to start a shop in a town. She becomes a brilliant businesswoman and the shop is a great success. The problem is that she gets bored and then wants to start a new business. She drags the family from town to town, where she buys a pub, a hotel, a boarding house, and other businesses. (Grenville’s mother said that they moved so often she ended up attending 14 different schools.)
The education of her children was important to Dolly. The schoolteacher in her yearned for them to succeed academically. She sends her son, Frank, and daughter, Nance, to boarding schools, but while Frank is allowed to come home for weekends, Nance boards at the strict Catholic school year-round except for holidays. She is a brilliant student and fits in until she questions some aspects of the Catholic religion, and then is referred to as the devil.
Although Dolly is unkind to her children – really horrid, if I may say so – she is not going to put her children deliberately through hell and immediately calls Nance home and finds her a new school. And yet she is never as kind as she should be to Nance and Frank. When both sons enlist during World War I, she worries about Max, the youngest, but doesn’t give a damn what happens to Frank. Frank becomes a prisoner of war: she barely gives him a thought. And as for the future of Nan, she badgers her to become a pharmacist instead of a teacher, because a woman pharmacist has the same financial opportunities as a man. Nance finally cannot resist her mother’s determination.
So what kind of woman was Dolly? Complicated or brutally single-minded? Ambitious or just vicious? A cold mother who neglected her children – or doomed to motherhood because she had no access to contraceptives?
This short, well-written book is fascinating in parts, but often wearying, because Dolly is so cold and unlikable.
I admired the realism of this slim volume, but it was not for me.
Is Your Ideal Job Reader-in-Residence?
In Fort Collins, Colorado, the Perelandra Bookshop has a unique staff position. They hire a reader-in-residence, who, for three months, is given a book and coffee stipend and can follow his bliss and read whatever he wants. He is required to show up and read at the bookshop twice a week, but has no other responsibilities.
Steven Shafer, Reader-in-Residence
In an article in the Colorado Sun, owner, Joe Braun, explains the concept. “I think the residence paralleled my own personal concerns about the extent to which we focus ourselves on production. In focusing on production, foregrounding content creation, what we do is necessarily create a consumer in the process. The idea is: produce, consume, produce, consume.”
