I can't thank Penguin Books (UK) enough for the opportunity to read this wonderful book. 

There is so much to admire in Elizabeth Strout’s writing, it’s hard to do it justice. This is a series of stories linked with each other and with her previous novel My Name is Lucy Barton through superbly realistic characters. Narrated in the third person (as opposed to the first person of the earlier book), it is chock-full of dialogue and the author excels at this - dialogue, reaction and even the tiniest gesture all convey the deep emotion at the heart of their stories. My heart breaks for all of them - mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives - torn apart or running away from each other, isolated in their new lives, hurting in many cases, yet still linked at an unspoken level. Unspoken that is until one day the floodgates open and their emotions spill out in an unspeakably poignant set of vignettes. Powerful writing and not a wasted word in fewer than 300 pages. I’ll be recommending this to everyone I know.