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The Burgess Boys: A Novel
by Elizabeth Strout
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “What truly makes Strout exceptional . . . is the perfect balance she achieves between the tides of story and depths of feeling.”—Chicago Tribune NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Good Housekeeping Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently calls them home.…
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"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."