The Things We Never Say

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a quiet, searching new novel set in a small coastal town in Massachusetts. The story centers on Artie Dam, a fifty-something high-school history teacher with decent friends and wholesome hobbies — a man who spends his days teaching eleventh graders, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it, while spending weekends sailing on Massachusetts Bay. By all appearances, he is settled and content.

But beneath the surface, Artie carries a persistent unease, turning over a question that shapes the whole novel: how well can we ever really know the people closest to us? His sense of isolation deepens as he looks out at a world that feels increasingly unmoored. Then Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him — one that threatens to upend everything he thought he understood about his marriage and his own history. What follows tests his relationship with his wife, even as it draws him closer to his son.

Marking a departure from the interconnected Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge novels that have defined much of her recent work, this stands as a fully standalone story with new characters, though Strout's signature voice — gentle, precise, and deeply attuned to the ache beneath ordinary lives — remains unmistakable. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the summer, The Things We Never Say is, at its heart, a meditation on loneliness, truth, and the fragile bonds that hold families together even in uncertain times.