My Name Is Lucy Barton: a novel (Lucy Barton, 1) - Tapa dura

A heart-wrenching story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge (Publisher's description)

I am deeply impressed. Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue. I have never read her before and I knew within a few sentences that here was an artist to value and respect (Hilary Mantel)

Strout's best novel yet (Ann Patchett)

An exquisite novel... in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to - 'I was so happy. Oh, I was happy' - simple joy (Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review)

So good I got goosebumps... a masterly novel of family ties by one of America's finest writers (Sunday Times)

My Name is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships... Deeply affecting novel...visceral and heartbreaking...If she hadn't already won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge this new novel would surely be a contender (Observer)

Hypnotic...yielding a glut of profoundly human truths to do with flight, memory and longing (Mail on Sunday)

This is a book you'll want to return to again and again and again (Irish Independent)

Slim and spectacular...My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.... (Washington Post)

My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one (Newsday)