Oh William!
ELIZABETH STROUT
(VIKING, 256 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

“You’re unique, Lucy, you’re a spirit,” says her ex-husband William, a scientist with a well-tended white moustache. He speaks of Lucy’s exuberance and joy, neither of which were much in evidence in My Name is Lucy Barton, Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout’s highly acclaimed novel of 2016 – so different in style from her previous fiction – in which she lay in a hospital bed in New York, her estranged, abusive mother at her side.

In Oh William!, Lucy speaks directly to the reader again, without the multiple viewpoints of Anything is Possible, the wonderful 2017 short-story collection in which she also features. Now 63, she’s recently widowed, a successful novelist (she even travels first class) but still easily frightened, haunted by her dismal childhood; its toxic fallout, diagnosed by a therapist as PTSD, may have ruined her first marriage. She often feels invisible.