In Oh William! (2021), the third book of Elizabeth Strout’s ongoing Amgash series, she returns to Lucy Barton as memoirist. While the first novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), introduced the eponymous writer, the character of William, her first husband, barely merited mention. Sure he was responsible for the story – sending her mother to visit her in hospital – but he himself never visited. And so, like the sidestep into Amgash’s small town lives that was Anything Is Possible (2017), Strout once more draws back the curtains on almost throwaway mentions and finds a world of intricate emotion waiting on the doorstep.

When the novel opens, Lucy’s second husband has recently died, but it’s a reconnection with her first that opens up the scale of their lives. With grown-up children, their lives have always been interlinked, but they’ve gone on to new lives with other people to varying degrees of success. At the end of another relationship for William, one of his daughters gifts him an ancestry kit through which he discovers he was not his mother’s first child. Reaching out to Lucy they take a road trip to explore this hitherto unknown branch of the family tree.

Life is somewhat like a road with stops along the way and the destination is never clear. But ultimately it’s all about the journey. All the lives herein are on – or have been on – their own surprising trajectories, whether it’s Lucy and William, the mother that gave up her first child, or that child itself. The facts may be there, but the inscrutability of the people prevents us fully understanding them. Perhaps that’s why Lucy writes: to lay bare her own journey as she sees it.

Through Lucy’s authorial power, Strout uses her own writerly skills to discover layers of emotion (of uncertainty; relief, confusion, fear) in the simplest of facial expressions or silences. There’s a searing wisdom here hidden in the simplicity of the style, which is presented as a carefully carefree jotting of memories and reflection. Through these novels (and Oh William! is a fine addition) Strout is stitching together a profound patchwork that understands life has loose ends and their mysteries are simply part of the pattern.