Virtual Event: Elizabeth Strout

Harvard Book Store, Politics and Prose, and Books & Books welcome ELIZABETH STROUT—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name Is Lucy Barton—for a discussion of her latest novel, Oh William!. She will be joined in conversation by CYNTHIA D'APRIX SWEENEY, bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company.

Ticketing

All tickets include a hardcover copy of Oh William!. U.S. shipping also included. 

Books bundled with tickets will be shipped out after the event. Please note: we are unable to ship internationally.

About Oh William!

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William.

Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.

So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”

Praise for Oh William!

“Loneliness and betrayal, themes to which the Pulitzer Prize–winning Strout has returned throughout her career, are ever present in this illuminating character-driven saga. . . . Strout’s characters teem with angst and emotion, all of which [she] handles with a mastery of restraint and often in spare, true sentences. . . . It’s not for nothing that Strout has been compared to Hemingway. In some ways, she betters him.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)