Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout is a quiet, emotionally penetrating novel about grief, marriage, loneliness, family secrets, memory, class, and the strange distance that can exist between people who have known each other for decades . Published in 2021, it is the third major book centered on Lucy Barton, following My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible . The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 , with the judges praising Strout's psychological insight and her ability to find profound questions in ordinary lives. What makes Oh William! unusual is that almost nothing about its plot sounds extraordinary on paper. An older woman travels with her first husband to investigate a family secret. Yet Strout turns this seemingly simple journey into an exploration of a much larger question: How well can we ever really know another person—or even ours...
