North Woods is the story of a house in New England and its inhabitants over the course of around 400 years, from the 17th century to sometime around the present day. It begins with the establishment of a cabin in the woods by a pair of Puritan lovers, and a tale of an unnamed woman fleeing war who poisons the soldiers chasing her. Perhaps most memorable, though, are the sections that follow next, largely in the 18th century, concerning the Osgood family. Charles, a soldier, moves to the area and renovates the yellow house, as well as establishing an orchard. He becomes a notorious ‘apple man’, famous across the region for his unique Osgood Wonder apples. When he is called up to fight once again, he dies fighting in the Revolutionary War and the house passes to his daughters, Mary and Alice. They live out their lives in an increasingly isolated and codependent fashion, with neither marrying. Their gruesome ending comes to haunt the house through the subsequent centuries.

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.