Elizabeth Strout - O Meu Nome é Lucy Barton

Lucy Barton lies in a hospital bed, slowly recovering from surgery that should have been simple. Visits from her husband and daughters are infrequent and Lucy barely makes the most of them. The monotony of her hospital days is broken by an unexpected visit from her mother, who sits at her bedside for five days. Mother and daughter haven't spoken in years, as many as Lucy spent without visiting the house where she grew up and as many as her mother spent without visiting her in New York, not even to meet her granddaughters.

Reunited, the two exchange news and whispers about Lucy's childhood neighbors, but beneath the placid surface of their small talk pulse the tension and longing that have marked Lucy's life: her childhood of poverty and deprivation in Illinois, her desire to be a writer and the uncomfortable feeling of not belonging anywhere, her escape to New York, and the silent disintegration of her marriage, despite the luminous presence of her daughters. With a past that still haunts her and a present on the verge of implosion, Lucy Barton needs to focus to see further and stand up again.

More than a mother-daughter story, this is a novel about the sometimes insurmountable distances between people who should be close, about the weight of unspoken words within the most intimate relationships, and about the loneliness we all feel at some point in our lives. Intertwined in this narrative is the voice of Lucy herself: as observant, wise, and profoundly human as that of the writer who gives it form.