Briefly Noted

My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House). Much of this beautifully unsentimental novel takes place over five days in a New York hospital, where Lucy Barton, the narrator, is recovering from surgery. Her estranged mother is also there, filling the room with endless unspoken memories about Lucy’s deeply poor, troubled childhood. Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Olive Kitteridge,” writes of a powerful, imperfect familial love. “Lucy comes from nothing,” one character says. But Lucy knows that no one comes from nothing: we’re haunted by our past every day. “This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world,” Lucy reflects. “Half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”