Autorentext
Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine.

Zusammenfassung
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a “stunner” (People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.
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“Tell Me Everything hits like a bucolic fable. . . . A novel of moods, how they govern our personal lives and public spaces, reflected in Strout’s shimmering technique.”—The Washington Post**

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Vogue, Parade

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”

Leseprobe
1

This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.

• Autumn comes early to Maine.

  By the second or third week in August a person driving in a car might glance up and see in the distance the top of a tree that has become red. In Crosby, Maine, this year it happened first with the large maple tree by the church, and yet it was not even midway through the month of August. But the tree began to change color on its side facing east. This was curious to those who had lived there for years, they could not remember that being the first tree to change color. By the end of August, the entire tree was not red but a slightly orange yellowy thing, to be seen as you turned the corner onto Main Street. And then September followed, the summer people went back to where they had come from, and the streets of Crosby often had only a few people walking down them. The leaves did not seem vibrant, overall, and people speculated that this was because of the lack of rainfall that August—and September—had endured.

  A few years earlier, people entering the town of Crosby from the turnpike’s exit would drive past a car dealership and a donut shop and a diner, and also by large run-down wooden houses whose porches held things like bicycle tires and plastic toys and coat hangers and air conditioning units that had not been used in years, and in one of these houses a middle-aged man named Ricky Davis lived. He was a large man and frequently drunk and could often be seen leaning over the rail of his side porch with his pants halfway down showing his huge bottom, crack and all, to the folks driving by, and those who had not seen this before would turn their heads to watch with a sense of wonderment. But then the town council had voted to put in the new police station at that spot, and so Ricky Davis and the house he had lived in were now gone; it was rumored that he was living out near the old fairgrounds in a Hatfield Housing unit.

  When you got into the middle of the town you could see a large brick house that stood a little off Main Street. After the clocks were set back in November, making it dark earlier, the few folks driving by, and those who might be strolling on the sidewalk across the street, could see into the windows of this house, yellow from the lamps turned on inside, and Bob Burgess and his wife, Margaret Estaver, might be observed cooking together in their kitchen until they tugged their curtains closed. People knew who they were, and in a way not fully conscious there was a sense of safety that came from this couple living right here in the middle of town: Margaret was the Unitarian minister, and she had her following. Bob had been a lawyer in New York City for many years in his younger days, but nobody held this against him, probably because he had grown up in Shirley Falls, forty-five minutes away; he had returned to Maine almost fifteen years ago when he married Margaret. He still took occasional criminal cases in Shirley Falls and was known to keep an office there, though he had mostly retired by now. And also—people spoke of this quietly—Bob had suffered a tragedy in childhood: He had been playing with the gearshift of the family car and it had rolled down the hill of the Burgesses’ driveway; people in town understood that the car—and therefore Bob—had killed Bob’s father, who was checking on their mailbox there.

  Olive Kitteridge, who was ninety years old and living in the retirement community called the Maple Tree Apartments, knew this about Bob Burgess and she had always liked him, she thought he had a quiet sadness to him, most likely from this early misfortune. Olive did not particularly care for Bob’s wife, Margaret. This was because Margaret was a minister and Olive did not like ministers—except for Cookie, who had married her to her first husband, Henry. Wonderful man, Reverend Daniel Cooke. And wonderful man, Henry Kitteridge.

  The pandemic had been hard for Olive Kitteridge—hard for everyone, really—but Olive had endured it, day after day in her little apartment in this retirement community, yet when they stopped allowing people to eat in the dining room and started bringing their food to them instead, she thought she would go absolutely batty. By the end of that first year, though, with her vaccinations and then later a booster, she was able to get out a bit more, someone might drive her into town or take her down by the water. But the real problem was that during the pandemic, Olive’s best friend, Isabelle Goodrow, who lived two doors down from her, had taken a bad fall and—of all the awful things that could have happened—had been moved “over the bridge” to the nursing home part of the place. Now Olive went to visit Isabel…