Isabelle and Amy are a mother and teenage daughter, living together in a single parent household in the 1970s in the fictional Maine town of Shirley Falls. It could be any rural town in New England: conservative and provincial in outlook and a far cry from the sophisticated big city of Boston.
Although not particularly close, these two eat, sleep and rub along together in Isabelle’s modest house. When 16-year-old Amy discovers her newly developed sexual power and attracts the attention of an older man, she becomes increasingly withdrawn and taciturn. The way in which Amy is outed causes Isabelle to be overcome with guilt and shame.
Isabelle’s only chance to escape the family home is by going to work in the office of a local mill, in a job she despises. When Isabelle was Amy’s age, she planned to be someone – a teacher and finds herself now as an adult suffering from thwarted ambition. As a substitute for the education that was denied her, she tries but gives up on literary classics as an aid to self-improvement.
Her close-knit community of co-workers frustrates her at first, as they fill their days with gossip. But each of these women hides a secret, that they are at first reluctant to talk about. One is battling cancer, the other an errant husband. And Isabelle is fixated with her married boss.
Isabelle and Amy find it increasingly difficult living together under the same small roof. As their relationship disintegrates into dysfunction, the secret Isabelle has been hiding all these years is revealed.
The claustrophobic story world is beautifully realised, particularly the way these two characters co-exist in resentful proximity, and now have nothing to say to each other. Both socially awkward, they suffer the agonies of their embarrassment in the full glare of the public eye in their judgmental neighbourhood.
In her debut novel, Elizabeth Strout has created one of the most powerful mother and daughter relationship stories I have read in a long time.