Strout had “just finished” Oh, William!, she says, when the pandemic started. And so I thought, ‘Okay, he gets his story.’” And I just said, ‘Okay, I have to deal with you?’ And then Oh William! showed up, because of the Laura Linney thing. But then, you know, it's like, Olive showed up again. “I never intended to write another one about that character. Strout had not, she says, planned on bringing back Lucy Barton – in her mid-sixties now, in Lucy By the Sea – for another book. It's why she’s managed to create characters so vivid, so unfailingly human, that even their portrayal by actors such as Laura Linney (who played the title character of Lucy Barton on Broadway and in London) and Frances McDormand (the loveably cantankerous Olive Kitteridge in an Emmy-winning TV series) can’t quite eclipse the Lucies and Olives readers picture in their heads. “I think,” she tells me, “that everything about everybody is extraordinary.” It’s a skill that comes from a place of deep observation: Strout’s work is about the stuff other authors don’t choose to see. Since then, she’s maintained that rare balance: of being equally appealing to mainstream readers and literary critics alike, winning admiration from Zadie Smith and the late Hilary Mantel while being devoured and discussed at book clubs across the world. Strout, who is 66, has been publishing literary fiction inspired by the emotional nooks of everyday life since 1998, when her debut novel Amy and Isabelle was released to critical acclaim and a spot on the bestsellers list. But for an author whose novels inhabit the well-worn and the overlooked, the homely comforts of faded tablecloths and sun-warmed wood – it feels overly formal. For an author of her stature – nine novels, all bestsellers a Pulitzer Prize stage and screen adaptations a potential Booker Prize win next week for her shortlisted recent novel, Oh, William! and a new one, Lucy By the Sea, out in a matter of days – such a fancy setting makes sense. It’s a crisp, cloudless October morning in London, and Elizabeth Strout is tucked into a well-stuffed armchair in a smart hotel lobby.

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