Olive is the dowdy, unpleasantly sharp, middle-aged schoolteacher that everyone loves to hate. But Elizabeth Strout’s mighty pen renders her achingly human and, in fact, indispensable to every character portrayed in this truly flawless book: Henry Kitteridge, Olive’s mild-mannered husband, who understands and forgives her when no one else will; a suicidal ex-student, who finds in her the teacher that always believed in him; a perfect stranger, whose anorexia contrasts so starkly with Olive’s well-fed bulk.
A rare literary novel that is also funny, wise, and moving.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.