Delighted to be given the opportunity to read Oh William! as I am a big fan of Elizabeth Strout's previous novels. I am now bereft to have finished it. She writes so brilliantly about people growing apart and coming together.

One of my favourite authors! I love the way she writes with such depth and warmth and touches on subjects that you don’t realise will mean anything to you, until your completely absorbed! Lovely to see Lucy Barton return and the continuation of her life...good and bad! A 12 out of 10 read for me.

A continuation of a series that I never knew I needed. I really enjoy these quiet slow books. It’s incredibly rare to get the inner monologue of an older women. Especially if the book is not about a loveable curmudgeon. These stories have taught me things I didn’t know I needed.

<i>And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.</i>

My God, I don't know how she does it! I'm just obsessed with Elizabeth Strout. The tautness of her sentences. The brutality of her themes. A big appeal to me is about how she writes about older people- she came to writing quote-unquote "late", in her 40's, and her work provides a really badly needed counterpoint for me. I love my Generation Z students, but it's good to have a contrast in terms of life perspective, you know?

<i>Oh William!</i>'s narrator is Lucy Barton, reappearing in Strout's work for (I think) the third time. A person with time on their hands could probably do a spiderweb chart of how all the characters in Strout's work connect with each other, a la David Mitchell, but I am not that person. I think I MAYBE spotted a cameo from Olive Kitteridge's son, but I am not sure.

The other elements of Strout's work that I love: the dialogue, the humour, the unexpected brutal moment. I loved Lucy's line about a small Maine town: <i>"If I were a man who wanted to kill a young girl and get rid of her body and get away with it, this is where I'd do it and dump her, Jesus."</i> It's the 'Jesus' that really makes the line sing, imo.

Themes here are of regret, performance, projection. If the people we love do not know us, can we ever really be known? The plot of <i>Oh William!</i> deals mainly with secrets and secrecy - what gets revealed, and what that does to our prior conception of a person.

I loved the characters in this. I loved the depiction of Lucy's loving if imperfect relationship with her daughters. I loved the development of her relationship with her ex husband William, and her discussions of her second husband David. Overall, this had strong rings of Anne Tyler for me, in terms of its examination of family ties.

What a wonderful book, and a wonderful writer. Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.