Shafts of childlike love and hate come back from the first days in Maine: irritable hatred of jigsaws and the borrowed house love of the sea. She makes a chronicler’s progress, but unseen, unspoken and forgotten things are part of her subject. What can she recover from these months? She is not like one of Joseph Conrad or Ford Madox Ford’s narrators, ranging back and forth over time, circling and returning to events. “It’s funny the things we remember, even when we think we are not remembering well any more.” The novel takes the shape of Lucy’s remembering. Lucy goes where she is put, resisting engagement in a way that is hard to fathom until we understand how deeply it is connected with grief for her second husband, and separation from the city they shared. William continues uncommunicatively in his self-appointed task of saving Lucy’s life. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeats, and this is how they go on. “What are those?” Lucy asks in disbelief, seeing his plastic gloves for use at the petrol pump.

“Maybe just a few weeks,” he lies, firmly putting her computer in the car while she insists that for this brief spell she’ll only need an iPad. He rents a house on the coast of Maine and hurries Lucy out of her beloved New York. William takes command when he sees the pandemic coming. “My mind was having trouble,” she says, as if her mind were separate from herself, and so she feels it to be throughout the disorienting stretches of an unknowable year. Lucy is vague and detached in ways that make her strange, not least to herself. “I don’t know how to say it,” Lucy hesitates, thinking back to the early weeks of the pandemic, “but my mind was having trouble taking things in.” Here is Lucy’s voice again, the voice that first held readers rapt in Strout’s 2016 My Name Is Lucy Barton. Now Lucy by the Sea picks up the story, but there is a virus spreading and we are at the dawn of a changed world.

In it, her much-loved narrator Lucy Barton returns tentatively to the company of her first husband, William, thinking all the while about empathy, loneliness and her lifelong sense of invisibility. Last year she published Oh William!, which is on the 2022 Booker prize shortlist. E lizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty.

Lucy barton