The Burgess Boys: A Novel

"A dirty little secret of being an NPR host (OK, for me anyway) is that we read what we have to read, not necessarily what we want to read. But when I saw that Elizabeth Strout had something new, I put it on my personal reading list and devoured it in every spare minute I had. The Burgess Boys is set in Maine and is about two brothers who are bonded by a childhood tragedy. They’ve each grown up and more or less recovered, but they live very separate lives, until they reluctantly go back home to help a nephew who has been accused of a hate crime. If you have difficult relations with a sibling, if you have ever wondered why a seemingly nice kid does something hurtful and mean, if you’ve ever had an internal struggle about new people in your neighborhood … this book offers a gentle but clear-eyed way of thinking about those things."