Reading List

Authors Like Elizabeth Strout

For eighteen years Strout wrote the same corner of Maine. Olive Kitteridge (2008) is thirteen linked stories set in the coastal town of Crosby, in which a retired schoolteacher is the centre of some and a figure crossing the background of others; it won the Pulitzer Prize and became an HBO miniseries with Frances McDormand. My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) is a woman in a hospital bed with the mother she has not seen for years sitting at the foot of it. The Burgess Boys (2013) took her to the mill town of Shirley Falls. And then, in Tell Me Everything (Random House, September 2024, an Oprah's Book Club pick and shortlisted for the Women's Prize), she brought Olive, Lucy and Bob Burgess into the same book, which readers had waited a decade for. Her eleventh novel, The Things We Never Say, published on 5 May 2026, does the opposite: a standalone, a new cast, an unnamed coastal Massachusetts town, and a history teacher in his late fifties called Artie Dam who arrived in her head from an obituary photograph. Her own account of it is four words long — she turned a page and left Maine. The ten below are chosen on the plainness, the recurring cast and the refusal to raise a voice.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Maine, and now Massachusetts · Pulitzer Prize 2009 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Elizabeth Strout, the closest match is Anne Tyler: the same difficult older woman, the same marriage treated as a long argument, the same ordinary disruption doing the work of a plot. Kent Haruf is the quietest, Richard Russo the funniest and Marilynne Robinson the most serious about small places. Sarah Orne Jewett and Sherwood Anderson invented the linked small-town book she perfected. And Richard Yates is the argument against her: the same New England, with the consolation removed.

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

10 authors like Elizabeth Strout

01
The same difficult woman · Closest match

Anne Tyler

American · Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), Breathing Lessons (1988), Three Days in June (2025)

Tyler has written more than twenty novels, almost all set in Baltimore, built around a family that has quietly organised itself around one member's oddity and an ordinary disruption — a wedding, a funeral, a woman who walks off a beach — that makes everybody say the thing they have avoided for thirty years. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Booker in 2015. Knopf publishes her next novel in April 2027.

The nearest living relative, and the pairing readers make first. Both build books out of a difficult older woman and the people arranging their lives around her, both treat a marriage as the longest-running argument anyone will have, and both let damage emerge from what a character notices rather than from anything a narrator explains. Tyler is warmer and funnier; Strout is colder and will let Olive be genuinely unpleasant. Read Breathing Lessons.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Tyler →

Authors like Anne Tyler →

02
The quiet, moved to Colorado

Kent Haruf

American · Plainsong (1999), Our Souls at Night (2015)

Haruf set six novels in the invented town of Holt on the Colorado high plains, in short declarative sentences with no quotation marks around the speech. Plainsong follows a pregnant teenager taken in by two elderly bachelor cattle farmers who have no idea how to talk to her, and was a National Book Award finalist. Our Souls at Night, about a widow who knocks on a widower's door and asks whether he would like to come over and sleep beside her, was finished shortly before his death in 2014.

The same book with even less in it. Haruf and Strout both write ordinary rescue — someone difficult turns up, a household reluctantly makes room, and the rearranging is the plot — and both strip out ornament until the plainness itself is the effect. Haruf goes further; there is no comedy and almost no interiority. If you love Strout's sentences and would like them barer, start with Plainsong.

— Lisanne
03
The small place, taken entirely seriously

Marilynne Robinson

American · Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004)

Housekeeping is two orphaned sisters raised in a lakeside Idaho town by an aunt with no interest in keeping house. Robinson then published no fiction for twenty-four years and returned with Gilead, a dying Iowa minister writing a letter to his young son, which won the Pulitzer Prize; three further novels follow the same two families through the same town from different sides. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for twenty-five years.

The other great American novelist of a small town revisited from several angles, and the one who takes it furthest. Robinson does what Strout does across the Crosby books — the same streets, the same families, a different consciousness each time — with theology underneath it rather than psychology. She is slower and more demanding. Read Gilead if the quietness in Strout is what you value most.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marilynne Robinson →

04
The same town, the male side

Richard Russo

American · Nobody's Fool (1993), Empire Falls (2001)

Russo writes declining mill towns in upstate New York and New England, usually around a man in his fifties who has made a long series of avoidable mistakes and is still, more or less, liked. Empire Falls, about a man running a diner in a Maine town owned for a century by one family, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and became an HBO miniseries with Paul Newman. He returned to Sully and North Bath in Everybody's Fool and Somebody's Fool.

Strout's Maine with the comedy turned up and the men at the centre. Both write towns where everybody has known everybody far too long for surprises, and both keep returning to the same streets across books. Russo is more plotted, funnier and more interested in work and money; Strout is better on what people cannot say. If The Burgess Boys is the Strout you rate, read Empire Falls.

— Lisanne
Every book by Richard Russo →
05
The house, and the people thrown out of it

Ann Patchett

American · Bel Canto (2001), The Dutch House (2019), Tom Lake (2023)

The Dutch House, a Pulitzer finalist, is a brother and sister sitting in a parked car outside the house they were thrown out of, returning to it for decades. Tom Lake is a mother telling her three grown daughters, during a cherry harvest, about the summer she spent with a man who became famous. Bel Canto won the Orange Prize. She co-owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, which she opened in 2011 when the city lost its bookshops.

The nearest match for what Strout does with siblings and inheritance. Both write families in which the wound is decades old and everybody has settled on a different version of it, and both use a single recurring object or place — a house, a town — to hold the years together. Patchett is the more elegant plotter; Strout leaves more unresolved. Read The Dutch House after The Burgess Boys.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ann Patchett →

Authors like Ann Patchett →

06
The Catholic version of the same street

Alice McDermott

American · Charming Billy (1998), The Ninth Hour (2017), Absolution (2023)

McDermott writes Irish-American families in Brooklyn and on Long Island across the middle of the twentieth century, usually looking back from a funeral or a kitchen. Charming Billy, which opens at the lunch after a drinker's funeral and works backwards through a lie the family told him for thirty years, won the National Book Award. The Ninth Hour follows a widow and her daughter taken in by nursing nuns.

The same restraint, one religion and one migration to the left. McDermott builds the same kind of book — a family, a secret nobody names, a narrator standing slightly to one side — and her prose has the same refusal of emphasis. What she has that Strout does not is the Church, which supplies a vocabulary for guilt and forgiveness that Strout's characters have to improvise. Read Charming Billy.

— Lisanne
07
The British equivalent

Tessa Hadley

British · The Past (2015), Free Love (2022), After the Funeral (2023)

Hadley writes English middle-class families over long spans: siblings gathering for three weeks at a decaying grandparents' house, a 1960s wife who walks out of a suburban marriage, sisters dealing with what a death reveals. She published her first novel at forty-six, writes regularly for The New Yorker, and received a Windham-Campbell Prize in 2016. Her subject is the ordinary domestic hour in which something shifts permanently.

The closest British writer working this ground, and criminally less read than Strout outside Britain. Both write in a plain register about families across decades, both are interested in the moment a person realises what they have chosen, and both refuse the big dramatic scene. Hadley is more sensual and more attentive to class; Strout is more compassionate. Read The Past.

— Lisanne
08
Older than the genre · The Maine original

Sarah Orne Jewett

American · The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Jewett grew up in South Berwick, Maine, accompanying her doctor father on his rounds, and wrote sketches of coastal Maine life for magazines from her twenties. The Country of the Pointed Firs is a summer visitor lodging with an elderly herbalist in a fishing village, in linked chapters with no plot to speak of, almost all of them about women who have outlived their households. Willa Cather considered it one of the three American books most likely to last, and she died in 1909.

The direct ancestor of Olive Kitteridge, on the same coastline a century earlier. The structure is identical — a small Maine town, linked pieces rather than a plot, a difficult older woman at the centre, and the sea doing the work weather does elsewhere. It is short, and reading it makes the Crosby books look like part of a tradition rather than an invention. Start here if you like knowing where a form comes from.

— Lisanne
09
Older than the genre · The linked town book

Sherwood Anderson

American · Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Winesburg, Ohio is twenty-two linked stories about the inhabitants of a small Ohio town, connected by a young newspaper reporter who listens to all of them and leaves at the end. Anderson called his characters grotesques — people who had taken hold of one truth and been deformed by it — and the book changed American fiction: Hemingway and Faulkner both learned from it directly, and every linked-story collection since is descended from it.

The book Olive Kitteridge is in the tradition of, and the comparison serious critics make. Anderson established the shape: a town, a set of self-contained stories, one recurring figure who binds them, and the discovery that everybody is carrying something they cannot say aloud. Strout is far warmer and lets her people connect; Anderson leaves them isolated. Read three or four of the stories rather than the whole thing at once.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against her

Richard Yates

American · Revolutionary Road (1961), Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)

Revolutionary Road follows a young couple in a Connecticut commuter town in 1955 who believe they are too interesting for the life they are living and make a plan to escape it. It was a National Book Award finalist and Sam Mendes filmed it in 2008. Yates wrote seven novels and two story collections, was admired by other writers and largely ignored by readers, and died in 1992 with almost everything out of print.

The same New England, the same ordinary marriages, and none of the mercy. Strout's people say the wrong thing for decades and are still, at the end, capable of being reached; Yates's are not, and he does not consider that a tragedy so much as an accurate description. The standing criticism of Strout — that suffering always gets redeemed by connection, that it is finally consoling — is best tested against him. Read Revolutionary Road and see which version you recognise.

— Lisanne
Every book by Richard Yates →

Where to start if you loved Elizabeth Strout

If you want the closest match, read Anne Tyler.

Breathing Lessons. A couple driving to a funeral and interfering with everybody on the way.

If you want it barer, read Kent Haruf.

Plainsong. Two old farmers, a pregnant teenager, and no quotation marks.

If you want the Maine original, read Sarah Orne Jewett.

The Country of the Pointed Firs. The same coastline, a century before Olive.

If you want the form's inventor, read Sherwood Anderson.

Winesburg, Ohio. Twenty-two linked stories, one town, one listener.

If you want the argument against her, read Richard Yates.

Revolutionary Road. The same New England, with nobody reachable at the end.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Elizabeth Strout

Who should I read if I love Elizabeth Strout?

Anne Tyler is the closest — the same difficult woman, the same marriage, the same ordinary disruption instead of a plot. Kent Haruf is plainer, Richard Russo funnier, Marilynne Robinson more serious, and Ann Patchett and Alice McDermott the nearest on families and inheritance. Tessa Hadley is the British equivalent and under-read. Sarah Orne Jewett wrote coastal Maine in linked sketches in 1896 and Sherwood Anderson invented the linked town book in 1919, so between them they are where the form comes from. Richard Yates is the argument against the consolation.

What is Elizabeth Strout's new book?

The Things We Never Say, published by Random House on 5 May 2026, 224 pages. It is a standalone with an entirely new cast, set in an unnamed coastal Massachusetts town, following Artie Dam, a history teacher in his late fifties who sails at weekends and is dealing with secrets he has kept for a long time. Strout has said the character arrived after she saw an obituary photograph, and described the move simply: she turned a page and left Maine.

Which Elizabeth Strout book should I start with?

Olive Kitteridge (2008), which won the Pulitzer Prize and is the one everything else grew out of: thirteen linked stories in one Maine town, with a retired schoolteacher at the centre of some and passing through others. If you prefer a single narrator, My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) is short, is told from a hospital bed, and is the entry point to four further books. The Things We Never Say (2026) requires no prior reading at all, which makes it a clean starting point too.

In what order should I read her books?

They interlock rather than form a series. The Crosby, Maine books are Olive Kitteridge (2008) and Olive, Again (2019). The Lucy Barton books are My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Anything Is Possible (2017), Oh William! (2021, Booker shortlisted) and Lucy by the Sea (2022). The Burgess Boys (2013) introduces Bob Burgess. Tell Me Everything (2024) brings all three casts together and is much richer if you have read at least one book from each. Amy and Isabelle, Abide with Me and The Things We Never Say stand alone.

Is she finished with Lucy Barton?

She thinks so, with the caveat of someone who has said it before. Asked by the Booker Prize whether anything about Lucy remained to be explored, Strout said she believes she is done, noted that she has claimed that previously, and called it a great run. Tell Me Everything ends without resolving everything, which leaves room. The Things We Never Say is the first practical evidence that she meant it: new characters, new state, no returning cast.

What is the criticism of Elizabeth Strout?

That she is consoling. The prose is deliberately plain, the crises are domestic, and however badly her characters behave they are generally still reachable by somebody at the end — which readers either find true to life or find too comfortable, particularly given the Oprah selections and the steady bestseller placings. The fair test is Richard Yates, who wrote the same region and the same marriages and left nobody reachable at all. Read fifty pages of Revolutionary Road and you will know which you believe.

Is the Olive Kitteridge miniseries good?

Yes, and it is one of the better adaptations of literary fiction. The four-part HBO series from 2014 stars Frances McDormand, who also produced it, with Richard Jenkins as Henry and Bill Murray in the late episodes, and it swept the Emmys. It necessarily selects from the thirteen stories and gives Olive a more continuous arc than the book does. Read the book first: the effect of the stories in which Olive is barely present is the thing television cannot reproduce.

Do I need to have read the earlier books to enjoy Tell Me Everything?

It works without them and it is a much better book with them. The pleasure of Tell Me Everything is largely recognition — Olive and Lucy finally in a room together, Bob Burgess carrying twenty years of his own novels behind him — and a newcomer gets the plot but not the accumulation. If you want the shortest route in, read Olive Kitteridge and My Name Is Lucy Barton first; that is about four hundred pages and it is enough.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“I turned a page and left Maine.”

— Elizabeth Strout, on The Things We Never Say.

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