My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

What an achingly, heartbreakingly, beautiful tragic story. It reads as the intimate exploration of Lucy Barton’s life and her journey of self realisation. She reflects on her appalling childhood, beautifully understated so that one can only imagine the true horror of it. You don’t need to know the detail but the damage it has done is evident. The glimpses - of her as a child locked in a truck while her parents work, of her brother paraded round the streets because he dressed in her clothes - suggest a brutality that has marked her for life. Her desperate longing for some sort of acknowledgment of her mother’s love, never realised, is heartbreaking. Yet Lucy Barton quietly arrives at a peace with herself, an acceptance and understanding of who she is and along with that the ability to move forward into a kind of contentment .