Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout is a fine writer, and novels such as The Burgess Boys and My Name Is Lucy Barton are very good. Still, Olive Kitteridge, her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of interrelated stories, has an immediacy and fierceness that one finds in only the very greatest books. Sequels nearly always disappoint, and it cannot be said that Olive, Again has quite the range and power of its predecessor. Nevertheless, the book does an excellent job of revivifying the ill-tempered, truth-telling Olive and her neighbors in and around fictional Crosby, Maine.