Recommendations
Books Like The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
For readers of the Maine family-and-community novel
If you loved The Burgess Boys — Jim and Bob Burgess returning to Shirley Falls, the Somali community, and the long history of a family shaped by a specific place — these books share the same interest in families that carry their history with them, small towns under pressure, and community identities in tension.
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Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer-winning companion Maine novel — Crosby, Maine is the companion community to Shirley Falls, and both novels portray the specific texture of coastal Maine small-town life with Strout's essential emotional intelligence.
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Buy on AmazonEmpire Falls
by Richard Russo
Russo's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about small Maine towns under economic pressure; Miles Roby's Empire Falls is the comic-tragic version of Shirley Falls, and both novels are about communities that cannot go back to what they were.
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Buy on AmazonMy Name Is Lucy Barton
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's companion novel — the formal companion in her fiction about difficult family relationships and the persistence of the past; Lucy and her mother are the female, spare version of what Jim, Bob, and Susan carry from their Shirley Falls childhood.
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Buy on AmazonA Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini's novel about Afghan women — the companion in fiction about displacement, community, and what it costs to leave and what it costs to stay; the Somali characters in The Burgess Boys find their most direct fictional companion in Hosseini's portraits of Afghan women.
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Buy on AmazonThe Round House
by Louise Erdrich
Erdrich's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a specific community and a specific injustice; the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota and Shirley Falls, Maine are both communities trying to maintain identity under pressure from outside forces.
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Buy on AmazonOlive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
The companion Olive novel — the continuation of Strout's Maine world; Olive in old age in Crosby, Maine is the companion portrait of Maine community life alongside the Shirley Falls community of The Burgess Boys.
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Buy on AmazonOh William!
by Elizabeth Strout
The second Lucy Barton novel — the companion in Strout's late fiction about long sibling and ex-marital relationships and the ways the past persists into the present; Lucy and William's road trip is the companion to Jim and Bob's return to Shirley Falls.
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Buy on AmazonNobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
Russo's earlier Maine novel — the companion in American fiction about working-class communities and the men who stay in declining small towns; Sully's North Bath, New York is the companion community to Jim and Bob's Shirley Falls, Maine.
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