Olive, Again
ELIZABETH STROUT
(VIKING, 304 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Olive, Again, Elizabeth Strout’s ­luminous eighth novel, returns to ­truculent, outspoken Olive Kitteridge, the main protagonist in her Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller of 2008. Like Olive Kitteridge , this sequel is a series of linked stories, not all of them starring retired maths teacher Olive, but all set around the small town of Crosby, Maine, where everyone knows too much about everyone else.

At the beginning of Olive, Again, she is in her seventies. Her first husband, Henry, has been dead for two years and has become, in hindsight, a wonderful man, much more so than when he was alive. Now she is lonely, as is Jack, the widower whom she marries. An ex-Harvard professor who was fired for sexual harassment, he’s not from Maine, and has prostate trouble. “I’m wearing a half-­diaper,” is his reassuring gambit when asking Olive to spend the night (Depends diapers are a recurring theme).