Anything's Possible by Elizabeth Strout

 

This book is a collection of character sketches for various people loosely tied together by some connection with Lucy Barton who grew up, left her small town and became an author.  There is the neighbor who was the janitor at Lucy's school and who visits her brother, a recluse who reveals a dark secret.  There are Lucy's cousins, Abel and Dottie, who each get their own chapter.  Patty was part of the family of daughters known as the Pretty Nicely girls.  She has lost her husband and has her eye on a man in town who always seems sad.  Another woman goes to Italy to visit the mother who left them and moved there with a man twenty years younger.  Lucy herself comes back for a visit and the reader learns about the abuse she and her siblings endured as children.

These are unsparing character sketches.  Some people have attained their childhood dreams, most have not.  Some have grown up to a better life while others are so scarred by their childhoods or other traumas that they can't move beyond them.  Regardless of who they are and where they have landed as adults, Strout outlines their lives and gives hope in a few pages. It is a New York Times 100 Notable Books selection.    This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.