I loved Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton.and unsurprisingly I loved this too. Something about Elizabeth Strout's writing gets to me and her subject matter is also excellent. Worth readin G.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately, it wasn't for me, but I'm sure others will love it.

Elizabeth Strout should be more of a household name than she is. Her writing is wonderful and this latest story is well up to her own very high standards. Deliciously readable from first to last, her worlds are deftly and beautifully portrayed in spare but elegant prose that is a joy to read. The perfect book-group read - so much depth and so much to talk about. Wonderful!

‘Anything is Possible’ by Elizabeth Strout is an extraordinary book about normal people living normal lives. On the outside, people live private, God-fearing lives, they get by, they smile, they work. Inside, they hide secrets, horror, misgivings, sadness and love. With the same vision and delicacy she displayed in ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’, Strout tells us about the people of Amgash, Illinois, the small rural town where Lucy Barton grew up.
In ‘Anything is Possible’, as in real life, threads of small town life are tangled together, generation after generation, each seemingly isolated but all connected by invisible tendrils of family, neighbourhood, school, farming. The shared history of living together through the years in close proximity, a community where everyone knows everyone else, their shame, their success, their failure, their betrayal and loyalty, is a community it is impossible to escape. Where adolescent misdemeanours, which may or may not have happened, are remembered as fact and decades of distrust attached. But as well as secrets and shame, there is redemption and love for those who face change and find a way to the other side.
This is more a collection of inter-connecting stories rather than a novel with a single narrative spine, but it is finely written with care and grace. A companion novel to ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’, it is not essential to have read that novel first but in some ways it does help.
There are nine chapters each focussing on one character and each, you realize at the end, are firmly entwined like the roots of a closely-planted grove of trees. In the first we see Tommy Guptill, elderly now, but once the caretaker at Lucy’s school. In the second, school counsellor Patty Nicely is insulted by student Lila Lane, daughter of Lucy’s sister Vicky. And so the stories keep coming as you gradually build up a picture of the Amgash citizens. After seventeen years away, writer Lucy is drawn back to the dirt-poor family farm where her brother Petie still lives. There, like the other characters in this novel, she discovers how your history cannot be left behind because it is hard-wired within you.
In her portrayals of these straightforward straight-talking Amgash citizens, Strout poses questions for the reader and does not give answers, expect to do some work yourself when reading her novels.
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Written as a companion piece to "My Name is Lucy Barton", "Anything Is Possible"draws from the characters referenced therein. Set in Lucy's hometown of Amgash, Illinois, it sees her return to see her siblings and former friends and acquaintances after a 17 year absence, during which she found fame and fancy ways as a celebrated author.
The glittering skyscrapers of New York City are a long long way from this dusty rural farming community where Lucy was raised, and her reasons for running away are deeper than her new-found success. Emotions from the past bubble to the surface as she reconnects with her family, all of it wonderfully captured in Strout's beautiful prose.
Everything I've read by Strout has captivated me. She creates rich, recognisable, relatable characters who breathe from the pages and inhabit the edges of your own reality. "Anything is Possible" is no exception and leaves you eagerly anticipating whatever she writes next. A truly phenomenal author at the top of her game.

Elizabeth Strout’s “My name is Lucy Burton” became an instant New York Times Bestseller with the success continuing across the Atlantic landing on several European bestseller lists. In May 2017 her short story collection “Anything is possible” was published, all stories are connected to Amgash/Illinois, the home town of Lucy Barton.

I love Elizabeth Strouts subtle, precise description of the lives of ordinary people, the horrors and hurts hidden behind the most ordinary small town facade. Most stories start very innocently until wham, a real twist in the story shakes you. As most of Amgash’s inhabitants are well known to each other or even related, the stories reveal interesting angles of previous characters in other stories. “Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast” for example is one of them as is “Sister” where Lucy Barton makes an appearance.

I greatly enjoyed each and every one of the short stories; Elizabeth Strout is a fantastic short story writer, go out and buy a copy. The German edition is not available yet.

I adored this book. Each story was completely original, yet story managed to capture my attention completely. I loved how the stories were connected so that minor characters in previous stories were then given their own story. I think it's a wonderful device that keep you wanting to read, move on and find out more. The best thing about this book is the characters. They all felt completely realistic and multi-dimensional and this is especially impressive as it is such a short novel with such a wide cast of characters. It's a shame that I didn't read 'My Name is Lucy Barton' before reading this as I feel that would have enriched my experience even further. I will be immediately purchasing that book and reading to as soon as I possibly can. I have high hopes that I will enjoy that book even more. Elizabeth Strout has now become an auto-buy author of mine - I'm just that impressed by the way she writes and the characters she creates. I highly recommend this book.

Wonderful, intertwined tales of unforgettable characters. Beautifully written.

Strout has continued to show she is an author to be respected.
Intricate and clever plots with wonderful writing.

Elisabeth Strout's new novel reintroduces characters from My Name is Lucy Barton and also introduces new ones from within Lucy's wider family and the town of Amgash. There are so many vignettes that are worthy of full books of their own, and hopefully they may be returned to in future novels. This is a stunning novel which quietly demonstrates the powerful impact small encounters throughout lives hold in the psyche. . Highly recommended.

With thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books (UK) for a review copy.

'Anything is Possible' is a novel of short stories, or a series of character studies/vignettes reminscent of the chapters of Strout's phenomenal 'Olive Kitteridge'. This new novel is set in the same world as 'My Name is Lucy Barton', the fictional town of Amgash. Familiar names and anecdotes trickle in from 'My Name is Lucy Barton', making the whole world feel very real and believable. 

Its more bitty than Olive Kitteridge though, and doesn't seem to have a unifying thread except for all the characters live in the same town and mention each other, particularly Lucy Barton. Its missing that thread a little, and it's jarring to start a new story with each chapter.

But the writing is beautiful and the characters are so vivid. If you're a fan of short stories and loved 'Lucy Barton', you'll adore 'Anything is Possible'.

2.5 stars

I really wanted to love this book!

But sadly the writing was just not for me.

To me it felt so unfinished and raw, as if it was a row draft and not a completed book.

Most of the sentences are strongly short, there is no easy flow and connection between one sentence and the next. I can not really describe it, but i enjoy books that have a more flowing feeling in the writing so much more then the books, like this one, that have the clearly structured sentences where you notice when one sentence ends and the next one starts.

While the characters certainly where interesting and the overarching connection to the book "My Name is Lucy Barton" is fantastic but to me there was just something missing to make this specific book work for me personally.

I do know that i want to try another book by this author, i want to see if her writing is generally not for me -which is fine not everything works for everyone!- or if this specific book and the different characters and their stories where just not for me. We'll see i guess

For now, sadly this book was not what i expected, the writing was not what i was hoping and expecting with all the praise it has been giving so far, and with that the entire book sadly was a disappointing read for me.

This follow-up – though not a sequel as such – to My Name is Lucy Barton comprises a number of interlinked stories about the inhabitants of Lucy’s hometown of Amgash, Illinois. Many of the characters mentioned in the earlier novel are here given more attention, and it’s a novel, not surprisingly considering the themes of My Name is Lucy Barton, which deals with poverty, guilt and suffering. To my mind it’s not as successful as the earlier work, mainly because it is so unremittingly grim with nothing to leaven the miserable situation the characters find themselves in. The suffering that Lucy and her family we know about here becomes even more graphic and I don’t think anything is gained by such knowledge. Everyone in this latest book is hiding secrets, but their suffering borders on exaggeration which lessens the impact. Can it be that everyone in a small town has a transgressive sexual encounter of some sort? Does no one lead a relatively comfortable and safe life? I was a bit disappointed by this novel as I felt that Strout had lost some of her subtlety and the deftness that made Lucy Barton such a moving book. A compelling read, to be sure, but perhaps bordering too much on soap opera.

“It was not in Tommy’s nature to regret things and on the night of the fire – in the midst of his galloping fear – he understood that all that mattered in the world were his wife and children and he thought that people lived their whole lives not knowing this as sharp and constantly as he did.”

What I love most about Elizabeth Strout's writing is how profoundly true it seems. Though the characters in her stories are fictional, they feel like real people with real problems. There is more life in any single one of her books than most writers manage in their whole careers.

This is not exactly a sequel to My Name Is Lucy Barton, it's more of a companion piece. These stories are set mostly around Lucy's hometown of Amgash, Illinois, after her memoir has been published. We meet some of the characters mentioned in that book, such as Mississippi Mary and the Nicely sisters. Tommy Guptill, a kindly school janitor who always looked out for Lucy, gets a chapter of his own. And in the book's stand-out story, Lucy returns to the house she grew up in for a reunion with her siblings, Pete and Vicky.

Strout's prose, as always, is spare and uncomplicated. Her sentences are stripped bare - they cut to the core of the issue at hand without extravagance. She makes this look easy but it is a skill that I marvel at. In a recent Guardian article about her writing day, she describes her process as taking the thing that is most pressing in her personal life and transposing that emotion into a character. This gives the scene life, she says, as opposed to having it wooden. She then builds her stories around these scenes by perceiving which ones are connected.

Anything is Possible examines the quiet suffering that most ordinary folk endure - loneliness, heartbreak, death. The characters are so wonderfully realised, their inner desires and vulnerabilities all faithfully represented with a modicum of expression. Yet again, Elizabeth Strout demonstrates her deep understanding of the human condition. She is one of the wisest and most sympathetic writers around, and we are lucky to have her.

Gail Honeyman has created in Eleanor Oliphant a remarkably engaging and endearing character, for all her lack of social graces. She is a unique and fascinating personality whose carefully learned life skills are increasingly not a good fit with her life. I was reminded at times of Don Tillman in The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. My heart went out to her very quickly and I loved this story, which is beautifully written. It's an unusual, delightful tale which deserves to be widely read.

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel “Anything is Possible” is the follow up and something of a continuation of her 2016 novel “My Name is Lucy Barton.” In a way it feels as if she is self consciously playing with the structure of the novel to capture an individual’s state of being from different angles. While the former gave fragments of Lucy’s life all centred around the recollection of a hospital visit from her mother, this new novel works more like a collection of interlinked short stories revolving around individuals connected with Lucy’s early life. These are people from the place of her deprived youth in rural Illinois. Many are struggling with issues of continuing poverty, obesity, isolation or emotional insecurity – even those who grew to be financially successful or married someone wealthy are still scarred by the privation of their younger years. Lucy Barton is the big local success story as she’s been in the media because she has a new book out (something of a memoir) which is also displayed in the local bookstore. She hovers in the consciousness of many of these characters prompting feelings of admiration, tenderness, jealousy or resentment. Around the gravitational pull of the (mostly) absent figure of Lucy, we’re given snapshots from these people’s later lives to create a tremendously powerful portrait of a community.

It would be somewhat useful to have a chart to plot out all the links between people portrayed in this novel as I found myself flipping back and forth to get the connections. This wasn’t a problem for me, more like an engaging puzzle. It will also be especially interesting to go back to the first novel to see where some characters have been mentioned previously. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to read “My Name is Lucy Barton” before reading this new novel. It can quite safely stand on its own as there’s no vital information lacking and each individual’s story is complete in itself. Some have nothing to do with Lucy at all, but others lean heavily on memories or opinions about Lucy. However, for readers who want to know more about Lucy Barton, there are some startling and heartbreaking revelations about her past. But overall the stories are wide-ranging from a celibate guidance counsellor to a Vietnam War vet involved in a complicated relationship with a prostitute to a B&B owner who is not to be trifled with. This is one of those books like Sara Taylor's “The Shore” or Yaa Gyasi's “Homegoing” that deals with characters individually so that it might feel like you're reading interlinked short stories, but an overarching conception and worldview binds the text together as a novel.

Set right in the middle of the novel is the story of Angelina, a grown woman who is estranged from her husband and goes to visit her seventy-eight year old mother Mary who lives in Italy. The pair converse about their lives, family and local gossip while awkwardly realigning their mother-daughter relationship as they haven’t seen each other in a number of years. Their intimacy stands out in sharp contrast to “My Name is Lucy Barton” where the extended conversations between mother and daughter were considerably icier. Yet, Mary and Angelina’s relationship is also strained as it feels like the daughter (the youngest in their large family) has never been able to grow out of her childish role. She desires something intangible from her mother just like Lucy Barton, but neither of these women can ever fully articulate what this thing is. The way that Strout relays their interactions and meditations about this strange state of being is moving and thought-provoking. I can’t help but feel she’s making a grander statement about mother-daughter relationships by juxtaposing Angelina & Mary's conversations with Lucy & Lydia's, but I feel like I’d need to reread both novels to fully grasp the implications of this.

Something that Strout does so exquisitely in this novel is portray the way in which people quietly maintain private beliefs throughout their lives. For instance, a man in one section believes that the disaster of his barn burning down was the will of God. Another woman believes that when her final daughter was born she recognized her instantly – whereas her other children felt like strangers at birth. These beliefs are intensely private and it would feel profane for the people who possess them to utter these ideas aloud. They are acknowledged to be totally illogical, yet they seem to guide their lives and influence their value systems like some private form of mysticism. It feels to me like many of us maintain these whimsical beliefs or superstitions which are admittedly absurd but still inform the core of our being. Strout illuminates how these occur in several of her characters' lives. They're examples of why a somewhat fanciful inner life exists simultaneously with the stark reality of our outer lives.

Although many of these stories are filled with vicious conflict there are intensely beautiful examples of kindness and sensitive reflection. Strout gets people's gritty characters while also recognizing the elegance with which everyone imagines a better future for themselves, but inevitably falls short because the world is never what we really believe it to be. One character muses “How did you ever know? You never knew anything, and anyone who thought they knew anything – well, they were in for a great big surprise.” Lucy Barton is viewed by many in her town as a success story, but part of the price of that success is never being able to return to the past. No matter how hard Lucy tries to reconnect with her origin or write about the “truth” of it, she can't fully engage with it. If she'd had a different constitution her story could have been the stories of any one of these people from her humble hometown. But she was determined to make her own way forward.

Hmm, My thoughts on this book did see this teeter towards a three-star review, but I have gone with four stars as there are moments in this book where it was excellent - touching and heartfelt in the way thatonly Elizabeth Strout can achieve. - but those moments are not as frequent as with her previous books.

Anything is Possible sees Elizabeth expand and investigate those lives, those stories, she touches on only in passing in My Name is Lucy Barton. In that book, Lucy and her mother rebuild a connection through gossip about lives and people from Lucy's hometown in rural Illinois, where she grew up in poverty and social exclusion. Now, Elizabeth brings those characters to life with a book that looks to build off the template of Olive Kitteridge, where the lives of a small town interweave and interconnect.

However, Anything is Possible does not hit the heights of Olive Kitteridge. This seems more a collection of short stories than the unravelling of a community and their interconnecting relationships. Nor is this a book that is as deep and as soul-searching as Elizabeth Strout's masterpiece. It does though demonstrate once again that when it comes to writing about the disappointments in life and the compromises we make, few can do it as well as Elizabeth.

There are a handful of stories here - people who Lucy Barton knew when she lived in the area, whether that be girls who used to tease her at school, janitors who took her under their wing, or war veterans struggling with PTSD. What links them though, it's hard to say. These are stories about the working class poor, about the trials of living hand-to mouth.

But there is something working deeper than that. I sense a connecting theme on the imperfect nature of love, about the acceptance we have to have of the cards that life has dealt us if we are to move on, if we are to lead as much a fulfilling life as we can. It is a quiet, gentle celebration of difference and our various paths. But how those paths often lead to the same place - our need for love. And how that love can come in many different forms, from unexpected places, and in unorthodox ways.

There was also an interesting underlying thread of karma here too. A sense of the world working to ensure that what goes around, comes around. For good as well as bad.

This book is quietly affecting and I enjoyed reading it very much. I would say that you probably should read My Name is Lucy Barton before you read this as that book is an important introduction to this community. But if you are new to Elizabeth Strout, my advice would be to read Olive Kitteridge as that remains a class apart.

Intricately linked short stories based around a single community and following on from the very successful 'Lucy Barton'. Occasionally we see people who have reached a state of contentment in life, but on the whole in these nuanced and moving stories we are given privileged access to the sadness, disappointments and pain of men and women who have found that life has let them down. Lucy Barton herself seems to have bucked the trend: she's the only one of her family to have survived the horrific abuse and neglect they all suffered as they grew up. We glimpse her through other characters' eyes, signing her books as a successful writer. However, when she comes back to visit her family the veneer of happiness cracks in a terrifying panic attack. No matter what we do to come to terms with our upbringing it doesn't ever go away. Elizabeth Strout is a fine writer, with an uncanny ability to paint the nuances of mood and feeling and to make great story-telling of the often painfully inadequate way we all attempt to communicate. Recommended.

I thought My Name Is Lucy Barton was outstandingly good, but I wasn't at all sure about a follow-up which is effectively a series of linked short stories about characters in small-town Illinois who are linked, some closely and some peripherally, to Lucy Barton. In fact, Anything Is Possible is, in my view, just as good.

Elizabeth Strout here does what she has been doing so well for so long: she creates completely recognisable, complete and believable characters and examines the important things in everyday life – family ties, love, kindness, selfishness, decency, wickedness, human damage and so on – through their eyes. In less brilliant hands it could be dull or forced or facile, but Strout has an extraordinarily shrewd understanding of the common complexities of life and the wonderful skill to put these over plainly but with humanity and compassion. Often, we see people's realisation that they have ended up somewhere they didn’t expect, and their life isn't even quite the life they thought they were in. We see, too, the understanding that acting to change things can bring difficulty and pain as well, perhaps, as liberation. As one of Strout's characters sums it up, "she saw [her]as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be."

I love Strout's prose, which has a graceful simplicity to it. It manages to be extraordinarily evocative while seeming gently straightforward. It is all in the third person, but the voice of each subject is very well evoked, so what she is writing about is quietly vivid, whether it is kindness or great wickedness – and we get both here, plus a full range of very human characters with their own mannerisms and quirks all laid gently before us with great clarity and insight.

In one place Strout writes, "she pictured her mother's quick and gracious loveliness to that man on the street." I think "gracious loveliness" is a fitting description of the quality of this book. Very, very warmly recommended.

This was such an exquisitely understated and quietly beautiful book. Each chapter is devoted to a member of the town of Amgash, giving the detail and minutiae of a life lived - it's highs and lows, mistakes, loves and losses. The writing is achingly good. Strout can tell us so much in just a few words and one gets the feeling that sometimes, it is what she doesn't say that fleshes out a description. This novel shows the importance of an ordinary life. Each character has a vital role to play and the stories intersect in a manner that demonstrates how close we all are at any time to each other, perhaps without our knowledge. The emotion is raw and honest, but never excessive or maudlin in any way. There is much pity for the people we are shown, but the overwhelming feeling I was left with was hope. Some of the characters have taken the worst possible start and made the best possible version of themselves, and for that we can all be truly hopeful. This is just a stunning book that will stay with me for a long time and I feel that in years to come, I will think to myself, I wonder how the people of Amgash are doing?