Olive Kitteridge

Thirteen stories set in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Maine. In some of them Olive Kitteridge, a retired seventh grade mathematics teacher, is the protagonist. In others she passes through a scene for a paragraph, or is only mentioned. The book is assembled so that a woman becomes fully visible from the outside before you are allowed inside her.

Olive is difficult. She is blunt to the point of cruelty, particularly to her son, contemptuous of sentiment, physically large and aware of it, and capable of sudden and unexpected mercy toward strangers in trouble. Her husband Henry is kind and she finds his kindness maddening. Her marriage, her son's departure and one late and unlikely friendship give the collection its shape.

The stories cover suicide, adultery, anorexia and an armed robbery at the hospital during which Olive and Henry are held in a bathroom and say things to each other that cannot be taken back, all in a register of complete New England understatement.

The late stories are the ones that get people. Olive's son marries, moves to California, and turns out to have an account of his childhood she does not recognise. Henry has a stroke. In the last piece she finds herself, at seventy four, unexpectedly in company again with a widower called Jack Kennison, and the book ends somewhere much warmer than it began.

It is short, and can be read as a novel or dipped into. What makes it remarkable is that Strout persuades you to love a woman who would be intolerable to know, without ever asking you to excuse her. Best for readers who want character above plot and can take a book that is honest about ageing.