Maybe by now, you’re familiar with Elizabeth Strout, who also wrote  Olive Kitteridge and I  Am Lucy Barton. Her latest book,   Lucy by the Sea follows  Lucy Barton, a divorced mother-of-two who leaves New York City during the pandemic to live in lock-down in a small, coastal Maine town with her ex-husband. And if you’re not familiar with the Lucy Barton series, don’t fret. You can easily pick up this novel as an one-off.  

Why I loved it: Though technically a novel, this book reads a whole lot like non-fiction (in fact, parts of it really reminded me of a Joan Didion memoir). When I picked this book up, I wondered if I really wanted to read something about the pandemic, an event that still feels so recent and exhausting. But as I go through, I found myself loving the story. Strout really captures so many of the feelings that I (and so many Americans) experienced during the pandemic: panic, anger, isolation, insecurity, skepticism, and lots of confusion. But at the same time , I loved the characters in this book  — they are imperfect plus messy and so very human — as well as Strout’s unique writing style, which feels both profound yet casual at the same time, as if she’s talking to a close friend.  

Get it from Bookshop or Amazon.