In her latest novel, Elizabeth Strout has struck out from the fictional town of Crosby, Maine, home to beloved characters from Olive Kitteridge to Lucy Barton, who washed up there in Lucy by the Sea (2022). The cast of The Things We Never Say – which has been named on the Booker Prize longlist – lives 200 miles to the south, in coastal Massachusetts, though they are getting up to much the same stuff. They host dinner parties at which small talk is made, with gossip reserved for the couples’ waspish postmortems. They splutter their way through awkward catch-ups with their children. They are anxious, cagey, sex-starved and confused.

Strout has become the foremost chronicler of the modern-day loneliness epidemic – a theme she attempts to make explicitly political in this novel. Like Kitteridge and Barton before him, middle-aged history teacher Artie Dam feels isolated from his peers. His wife, Evie, dismisses his attempts to engage in profound conversation. A family therapist, she handles Artie with the same distance she does her patients: ‘she was a professional, after all.’ Their only child, Rob, has been traumatised by the death of his girlfriend, for which he was at least partly responsible, and has become a solemn young professional, stuck ‘deeply inside himself’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Artie is depressed. Although he smiles his way through the school day, he becomes quietly obsessed with fantasies of suicide. At night, he stops reading and guzzles gruesome true crime shows instead. 

The novel follows Artie in the close third person as his determination to die comes and goes. The outcome is not really the point; retrospective narration, a favourite technique of Strout’s, soon reveals that Artie does not die until years later. What matters is the human exchanges that he has