Olive Kitteridge is dorsum and we are richer for it. Elizabeth Strout's new novel Olive, Again (Random House)—sequel to her 2008 novel Olive Kitteridge that spawned the eponymous television set mini-series and won a Pulitzer prize—is arguably better than its predecessor.

The story resumes with Olive in her mid-seventies nonetheless residing in fictional Crosby, Maine iv years after her married man Henry has passed, and it follows the next decade of her life. In these new pages a still sharp-tongued Olive takes a breath to contemplate "sunrises, sunsets, the unlike easily of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee," and rejoices at the sight of a new rosebud.

She gives sympathy to a daughter-in-police force she has never liked and rough comfort to a cancer-stricken mother who struggles with the unfinished legacy she leaves for her family unit. But maybe most poignantly Olive suffers bravely with the intimate indignities of an aging body and mind, and that new vulnerability makes us eager to soak up the wisdom of her raw honesty and fearless insight.

The volume'southward thirteen interconnected tales continue chronologically, with Olive primal to some stories and peripheral to others. Strout illuminates ordinary relationships and makes their issues visceral.

Both Olive and Jack Kennison—Olive'south suitor in the first book and second husband here—feel cut off from their grown children and clueless almost how to connect except awkwardly. An empty-nested couple married forty-two years has lived 30-five of them with yellow duct tape dividing their house since his affair. Their globe gets torn open equally their daughter shows upwards with a startling hole-and-corner. The enkindling sexuality of a seventeen-yr-old daughter unfolds in the presence of her male employer. A adult female whose childhood house has just burned downwardly with her estranged father in it hesitates to have her big inheritance.

Providing a satisfying sense of closure, Strout includes characters from her previous novels—Jim and Bob Burgess from The Burgess Boys and Isabelle Daignault nee Goodrow from Amy and Isabelle—all three of whom yearn for meaningful connection in these afterward years of their lives.

The primary problems Strout addresses in this 2d volume—loneliness, aging, measuring up—confound us all. She edifies the human to and fro betwixt snobbery and feeling worthless. So what if yous used to be somebody, ponders Jack. At present you are "just an old man with a sloppy belly and non anyone worth noticing."

One of Olive'south former students shows upwardly hither as a grown woman with a messy life and tells Olive "I envy y'all for ever thinking you were something." We root for Olive, and the rest, in those moments when they meet their own value considering nosotros know it'due south in that location. They run deep and truthful as authentic man beings who pino for a life more well-lived than theirs has been, crave rare connections with the family members they dear and lean on their flawed—and aging—friends who understand life better than the young ever can.

Strout'due south writing is at its exquisite all-time, with clarity of view and gloriously bright metaphors, such as of the distance in ane couple's long marriage—"a rock wall that separated them but also provided unexpected dips of moss-covered warm spots where sunshine would flicker between them in a sudden laugh of understanding."

Strout depicts the beauty of the outdoors in stunning passages: boats with "their thin masts pointing to the heavens similar tiny steeples," and Maine'south late Feb sunlight with its "open-throated await that came toward the end of the day's light….Information technology promised, that low-cal, and what a thing that was."

How wonderful that writers like Elizabeth Strout enable us to run into this gorgeous world with fresh eyes and to appreciate that we share the same flawed humanity, no matter our age or color, and trust our common interdependence because we make each other better. Olive Kitteridge—attuned to life'due south opportunities and limits—demands that nosotros wait honestly at our own selves and make our own inner peace with lives that have been imperfectly lived.

This summation of the human condition echoes as a main theme throughout the novel: "There is something much larger than we are… our chore—maybe even our duty—is to … behave the burden of the mystery with equally much grace as we can." Amidst all her struggles, Olive shows us her grace with perfect clarity and we stand in awe.

Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age she was fatigued to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was as well drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During the summertime months of her childhood she played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more oftentimes, lonely, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine, and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers.

During her adolescent years, Strout connected writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers, and was already studying – on her ain – the way American writers, in particular, told their stories. Poetry was something she read and memorized; past the age of sixteen was sending out stories to magazines. Her commencement story was published when she was 20-six.

Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law caste along with a Document in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services, before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Section of Borough of Manhattan Community College. Past this time she was publishing more stories in literary magazines and Redbook and Seventeen. Juggling the needs that came with raising a family unit and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each twenty-four hour period to piece of work on her writing.