By the Sea: By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

Product Information

By the Sea does not present the reader with sympathetic characters and the tales that are woven are often confusing and petty. Hablan prácticamente de la misma manera, con el mismo tipo de voz, y es difícil saber quién de los dos está hablando en un momento dado. It is a story of love and betrayal, of seduction and of possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times. Notably, Gurnah always makes his characters point out that they do not tell each other the whole truth; they leave gaps as if to protect each other and their families. He is sent to a detention center, but a social worker named Rachel, who specializes in difficult immigration cases, intervenes on his behalf.

The story certainly isn't linear, which was difficult for me at first, but as I relaxed into it, I came to appreciate the slower pace, the circuitous route, and all that it reveals. She grapples with memories of her late husband, her parents, of all the decisions she made in her life. I’ve connected with Lucy in all of the books about her, not because I shared her unique experiences, but because Lucy, as in the previous books, is introspective and so honest.So glad to have had the chance again to meet and join you in your reflection of life during lockdown. As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. I also appreciate that the Lucy books are on the shorter side and Strout inserts lots of breaks and pauses throughout. Thus, they manage to build a new kind of connection, by sharing their versions and memories of the same story. Even when the winds of history push them toward other, less hospitable shores—England, or the old, Marxist East Germany—Gurnah's characters are still the embodiment of mythic Zanzibar.

It was first published in the United States by The New Press on 11 June 2001 [1] and in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing in May 2001. new residential houses and apartments with breathtaking sea views from all over the world: Mallorca, Greece, New Zealand, South of France, Belgium, the West and East Coast of the United States, Denmark, Ibiza, South Africa, Saint-Barth, . William is my first husband; we were married for twenty years and we have been divorced for about that long as well.Although simple on the surface, Strout’s new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame — and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America. Strout has said, as did Lucy, that she always wants to know what it feels like to be another person. Gurnah’s latest (after Paradise) follows an East African immigrant living in a small English town as he and his family reckon with his past, which has long been shrouded in mystery. Rick Gekoski, one of the Booker judges who argued for The Sea, later wrote in its defence: "'It is a work of art, in the tradition of high modernism, and I'll bet it will still be read and admired in 75 years".

While Lucy is a fictional character, I can’t help but think that Elizabeth Strout might feel the same. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Written in delicately evocative prose, By the Sea is about the complex relationship between two men from Zanzibar, each from opposing sides. While some of Strout’s characters from her previous novels are referenced in this story, we also get to meet a few familiar characters when their paths cross with Lucy’s. It is hard to appreciate the stories and lives being unravelled when the narrators themselves seem unlikeable and distrustful.I picked up the book, and Lucy talks about taking a shower with water up to her ankles, and she talks about a baking soda and vinegar solution to fix it.

Strout has lovingly brought back Bob Burgess, from a previous novel and a few mentions of another Strout character I love, which was a great surprise. What happens when one person is confronted with another version of the story which they have been telling themselves for ages, about who they are and what their lives mean? With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession - a mahogany box containing incense. By the Sea is told from a variety of viewpoints, offering conflicting variations of the truth, both deliberately, to deceive, and through memory's decrepitude.It is a familiar minor climax in our stories, leaving what we know and arriving in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions. Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair . The result is a complex story of family squabbles, resentment, and misunderstandings spanning generations. I was used to officials who glared and spluttered at you for the smallest mishap who toyed with you and humiliated you for the sheer pleasure of wielding their hallowed authority.