Olive Kitteridge

Wow. Read this in one day (today, actually). I'm intrigued how I picked it up after another big prize winner, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and felt that Strout accomplished for me what I kept wishing Marquez had–written a book I literally could not put down. Not because the plot is so gripping, because it's purposefully not. The novel is full of a large cast of characters, though, all of whom at some point briefly glimpse the truth that a lot of the terrible things people do are really just because we're all lonely, but who then lose their grip on that truth in the muck of day-to-day living: from being on the causing and receiving ends of that loneliness. An excellent book to read in order to remember that everyone deserves empathy.