The Burgess Boys

Elizabeth Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force, wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prizewinning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strouts magnificent gift for humanizing characters. Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature.

Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susanthe Burgess sibling who stayed behindurgently calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, where the long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.

With a rare combination of brilliant storytelling, exquisite prose, and remarkable insight into character, Elizabeth Strout has brought to life two deeply human protagonists whose struggles and triumphs will resonate with readers long after they turn the final page. Tender, tough-minded, loving, and deeply illuminating about the ties that bind us to family and home, The Burgess Boys is Elizabeth Strouts newest and perhaps most astonishing work of literary art.

What truly makes Strout exceptional . . . is the perfect balance she achieves between the tides of story and depths of feeling. - Chicago Tribune

Strouts prose propels the story forward with moments of startlingly poetic clarity. - The New Yorker

Elizabeth Strouts first two books, Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle, were highly thought of, and her third, Olive Kitteridge, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. But The Burgess Boys, her most recent novel, is her best yet. - The Boston Globe

A portrait of an American community in turmoil thats as ambitious as Philip Roths American Pastoral but more intimate in tone. - Time