Amy and Isabelle: A Novel

Elizabeth Strout

Dec 2003 · Sold by Vintage

About this eBook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother, and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's secrets.

“One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place.”—The New York Times Book Review

Before there was Olive Kitteridge, there was Amy and Isabelle…

In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls—a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boys—only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past.

A Reader's Guide is included in this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitteridge to millions of readers.

Ratings and reviews

Oh my, Elizabeth Strout. I am deeply moved with every reading. Thank you for writing what you do, for offering us a deeper understanding of what it means to be empathic.

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About the author

ELIZABETH STROUT is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Olive, Again, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of the year byThe Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; 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 National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City.