Recommendations
Books Like Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
For readers of the long-intimacy road trip novel
If you loved Oh William! — Lucy Barton in her 60s, the road trip with her difficult first husband William, and the oblique meditation on long intimacy and what persists — these books share the same interest in old relationships, late-life reassessment, and the specific weight of knowing someone for a very long time.
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Buy on AmazonMy Name Is Lucy Barton
by Elizabeth Strout
The essential predecessor — the first Lucy Barton novel; Lucy's hospitalization, her mother's visit, her Illinois childhood; all the history that Oh William! builds on and that makes the Lucy/William relationship so resonant.
- 2
Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer-winning Maine novel in stories — the companion in her fiction; Crosby, Maine is the companion to the Lucy Barton world, and both books share Strout's essential interest in difficult people and long community life.
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Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's Booker-winning novel — the companion in literary fiction about belated recognition of what was missed and what could have been said; Stevens's retrospective account is the male, British version of what Lucy's 'I do not know' is about.
- 4
Buy on AmazonOur Souls at Night
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's final novel — Addie and Louis in Holt, Colorado; the companion in American fiction about two old people finding something in each other in their final years; Oh William!'s Lucy and William and Our Souls at Night's Addie and Louis are parallel portraits of unexpected late intimacy.
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Buy on AmazonGilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's Pulitzer-winning novel — John Ames's late-life letter to his young son; the companion in American fiction about old age and the retrospective account of a life; both novels ask what can still be given to the people we love.
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Buy on AmazonOlive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
The companion Olive novel — Olive in her late 70s and 80s with her second husband Jack Kennison; the companion in Strout's late fiction about old age and the surprising persistence of new intimacy.
- 7
Buy on AmazonOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
Vuong's autofictional novel in the form of a letter from a son to his mother — the companion in formally radical, spare American fiction that approaches devastating emotional material obliquely; the 'I do not know' of Lucy Barton finds its companion in Vuong's circling approach to what is hardest to say.
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Buy on AmazonThe Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's companion Maine novel — the family relationships and long histories that complete the picture of Strout's Maine world; Jim and Bob Burgess's long complicated sibling relationship is the companion to Lucy and William's long complicated ex-marital relationship.
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