The Burgess Boys: A Novel

Elizabeth Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force, wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prizewinning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strouts magnificent gift for humanizing characters. Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature. Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently calls them home.