Tell Me Everything brings together characters from across Strout’s writing career. In rural Maine, Bob Burgess (from 2013’s The Burgess Boys) finds himself taking on the case of a reclusive man who is under suspicion of the murder of his mother; also living nearby is novelist Lucy Barton, living near the coast with her ex-husband William and now firm friends with Bob; and at Bob’s suggestion Lucy also begins to visit the now nonagenarian Olive Kitteridge in her nursing home, where the two share stories and ponder on life and love.

Olive Kitteridge is a short story cycle covering several decades in the lives of the inhabitants of a rural Maine community. One character is common throughout the collection’s stories, the indomitable Olive, a retired schoolteacher, matriarch, and pillar (of sorts) of the local community. She is central to many of the stories, an important piece of the plot in others, and entirely peripheral to a few others. It’s superficially an odd kind of assemblage, betraying in some senses its roots as a collection of short stories published by Strout over the course of the whole of the 90s and 2000s. But it does contain narrative progression, its throughline being in the development of its lead character, who in the course of the book sees her son twice married, her husband incapacitated and later passing away, and the beginnings of an unlikely later-life relationship.

The Sense of an Ending is a short novel narrated by a retired, divorced man named Tony Webster. Its first part sees him recalling a series of incidents from his schooldays, largely concerning his group of intellectual / pretentious friends, of which the most significant is the newcomer Adrian. Eventually the two head off to separate universities where Tony has a short, unsatisfying relationship with a girl called Veronica, which involves an awkward visit to her family, and a meeting with his schoolfriends in London. Towards the end of his degree, he finds out that Adrian is dating Veronica. Not long afterwards, he finds out that Adrian has committed suicide, with a letter to the coroner citing philosophical reasons, which Tony admires.