The Burgess Boys: A Novel
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: It can’t be easy to sit down and write a new novel after your last,Olive Kitteridge, won the Pulitzer Prize (in 2009).   The pressure!  The pressure!   InThe Burgess Boys, novelist Elizabeth Strout somehow manages to survive whatever next-book anxiety while at the same time revisiting the themes and types of characters that have made her famous:  plainspoken Mainers (some transplanted now to Brooklyn) bound together by both love, competitiveness and the issues of the day.  Here, hotshot lawyer Jim and bighearted Bob Burgess come together over a politically incorrect prank perpetrated by their sister’s son--and discover that their distrust of each other has never really gone away.  But then, neither has their love.   Nobody does buried conflict and tortured familial relations better than Strout.  --Sara Nelson