NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From Pulitzer Prizewinning author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdownand the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.

No novelist working today has Strouts extraordinary capacity for radical empathy. . . . May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucys story.The Boston Globe

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Time, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, PopSugar, She Reads

With her trademark spare, crystalline prosea voice infused with intimate, fragile, desperate humanness (The Washington Post)Elizabeth Strout once again turns her exquisitely-tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, this time following the indomitable heroine ofMy Name Is Lucy BartonandOh William!through the early days of the pandemic.

As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Bartonis uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and longtime friend, William. For the next several months, its just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. They will not emerge unscathed.

Rich with empathy and emotion,Lucy by the Seavividly captures the fear, struggles, and isolation that come with life in a global pandemic, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when were apartthe pain of a beloved daughters suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love. We all live with peopleand placesand thingsthat we have given great weight to, Lucy says. But we are weightless, in the end.