Amy and Isabelle cover art

Amy and Isabelle

A Novel

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Amy and Isabelle

By: Elizabeth Strout
Narrated by: Stephanie Roberts
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Summary
 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. Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Women's Fiction Witty Funny Emotions

Critic Reviews

"Strout's insights into the complex psychology bewteen [mother and daughter] result in a poignant tale about two coming of age." —Time

"Impressive....Strout writes with abundant warmth." —People

"Poignant...sensitively imagined...[Amy and Isabelle] recalls the elgegiac charm of Our Town." —The Christian Science Monitor

"Stunning....Every once in a while, a novel comes along that plunges deep into your psyche, leaving you breathless....This year that novel is Amy and Isabelle." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Excellent....Strout's collective portrait...remains unflaggingly engaging....[W]hat a pleasure to gain entry into the world of this book." —The New Yorker

"Lovely, powerful...a kind if modern 'Rapunzel.'" —Newsweek

"Amy and Isabelle is an impressive debut....with an expansiveness and inventiveness that is the mark of a true storyteller." —The Philadelphia Inquirer
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Strout again delivers a fiction you wish would never end! As a mother the pain of children growing up is so well described as is innocence and the ending of it - another brilliant tale from Elizabeth Strout

Beautiful painful work about mothers and daughters

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I was really disappointed that the teacher didn't turn out to be the murderer of the young girl. Would have wrapped it up nicely that Isabelle's boss was actually Amy's saviour. But all in all, a beautiful book.

So Good!

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I loved how all the threads wove together and the descriptions of light, weather and nature, including human nature. Absolutely beautiful.

Looked forward to pressing play every time

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a brilliant coming of age novel, brimming with insights into human character and motivation. honest, beautiful and unsentimental. read with sensitivity and rare skill.

as good as it gets

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Elizabeth Strout has such a knack for lifting the veil off seemingly mundane, unimportant lives and revealing the pathos and wonderful humanity that lies just behind that exterior drabness.
Her ability to do this so deftly and with such sympathy and wry humour is a gift to us all.

Simply wonderful.

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