Recommendations
Books Like Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
For readers of the Pulitzer-winning Maine novel in stories
If you loved Olive Kitteridge — the formidable, difficult Olive and the linked stories of Crosby, Maine — these books share the same emotional intelligence, the same interest in small communities and the lives within them, and the same understanding of how people protect themselves from what they feel.
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Buy on AmazonOlive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
The direct companion — Olive in her late 70s and 80s after Henry's death; the essential continuation for anyone who wants to follow Olive further into old age and late revelation.
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Buy on AmazonGilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's Pulitzer-winning novel in Gilead, Iowa — the most direct companion in American fiction about specific small communities and the moral seriousness of ordinary lives; John Ames's letter to his young son is as precise and as moving as Strout's best stories.
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Buy on AmazonPlainsong
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's Holt, Colorado novel — the companion in the tradition of American fiction that finds dignity in plain lives in plain places; Haruf's spare prose is the closest American contemporary style to Strout's.
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Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's National Book Award-winning portrait of the Lambert family — the companion in American fiction about difficult people who inflict damage without knowing or intending it; the Midwestern professional-class version of what Strout portrays in working-class coastal Maine.
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Buy on AmazonThe Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's companion Maine novel — two brothers returning to Shirley Falls, Maine; the most conventionally structured of her novels and the one that pairs most directly with Olive Kitteridge as a portrait of coastal Maine community.
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Buy on AmazonMy Name Is Lucy Barton
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's companion Lucy Barton novel — formally spare and compressed, about Lucy's hospitalization and her estranged mother's visit; shares Strout's essential concerns about difficult mothers and the ways damage and love coexist in the same relationship.
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Buy on AmazonA Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in formally innovative American fiction that links stories across time and characters; both Egan and Strout show what a linked-story structure can achieve that a conventional novel cannot.
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Buy on AmazonOur Souls at Night
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's final novel about two old people in Holt, Colorado choosing each other for company in their final years — the companion in American fiction about unexpected late intimacy; Addie's proposition and Olive's second marriage are parallel acts of late-life reaching toward connection.
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