Viking snaps up 'stunning' new novel from Strout

Viking has snapped up a new novel by Pulitzer prize-winning, Booker-shortlisted author Elizabeth Strout. 

Isabel Wall, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Tell Me Everything in an exclusive submission from Denise Cronin at Random House US on behalf of Molly Friedrich at The Friedrich Agency. Andy Ward, e.v.p. and publisher at Random House, will publish in the US; Random House controls North American rights and translation.  

Tell Me Everything will publish 19th September 2024 and is billed as “a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world”.  

The synopsis says: “It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – ‘unrecorded lives’ Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.” 

Wall said Tell Me Everything “is a masterful new novel” from Strout, which “explores how our relationships endure and evolve, hurt and heal us".