Elizabeth Strout Audiobooks

Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and The Things We Never Say: small lives, enormous feeling

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

19,611 listener ratings

Who is Elizabeth Strout?

Portland, Maine gave Elizabeth Strout her material and she has been mining it, gently and relentlessly, ever since. Born there in 1956, she published a first novel, Amy and Isabelle, at forty-two after years of rejection, and the invented town of Shirley Falls has recurred through her work like a returning weather system.

Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009 and gave American literature one of its great difficult women, prickly, tactless and impossible to dismiss. The Lucy Barton novels that followed, beginning with My Name Is Lucy Barton, do something rarer still: they let characters wander between books, so a passing figure in one becomes the centre of the next.

Her sentences are plain to the point of transparency. What she does with them is anything but. Nobody currently writing is better on the things a family decides, silently and permanently, never to mention.

Elizabeth Strout in audiobooks

Artie Dam teaches history to sixteen-year-olds, has been married for three decades, sails on Massachusetts Bay at weekends and is quietly living a second life alongside the first. He is the centre of The Things We Never Say, published in 2026 and longlisted for the Booker Prize that summer.

Robert Petkoff narrates, and the restraint of the performance is the whole point. He declines to underline anything, which leaves Strout’s silences room to work across six and a half hours. Tens of thousands of listeners have already rated it above four and a half stars.

If this is your first Strout it stands entirely alone; if it is not, you will start spotting old acquaintances in the margins. Have a look at the listing below.