Amy and Isabelle

"Stunning... Heartbreaking... This novelist is destined for great things."   -  San Francisco Chronicle

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout’s bestselling and award-winning debut, Amy and Isabelle evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother — and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets. 

In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls, only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past.

"One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place."  -  The New York Times Book Review