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‘Tell Me Everything’ listens in on the stories of the heart

Elizabeth Strout packs more empathy onto a single page than most writers scatter throughout an entire book. Her fiction is filled with the scarred and the scared, good parents and bad, perpetrators and survivors, sinners and what she calls “sin-eaters.” Many of her characters are chronically lonely and emotionally fragile. Some are curmudgeons, gossips, narcissists, and bullies. The wonder is that she makes our hearts go out to all of them. 

In fact, Strout loves her characters so much that she keeps going back to them.

Her 10th book, “Tell Me Everything,” brings together several of her best-loved protagonists. These include Bob Burgess, a truly good man who doesn’t realize how special he is. Bob, who was featured in 2013’s “The Burgess Boys” grew up in Shirley Falls, Maine, believing he was responsible for his father’s accidental death. After years as an attorney for Legal Aid in New York City, he moved back to his home state to marry Margaret Estaver, a Unitarian minister, who became his second wife.  

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