Literary Fiction · Free kit

The Things We Never Say

Elizabeth Strout

• Literary Fiction
• Contemporary
• 2026

Artie Dam is fifty-seven, a well-liked high school history teacher in a coastal Massachusetts town in 2024, the man who sails on weekends and still cannot quite believe he lives in his wife's inherited house by the water. Inside, he feels cut off from Evie, now a family therapist, and from their son Rob, withdrawn since a crash ten years earlier. Elizabeth Strout's Booker Prize 2026 shortlisted novel is spare, political, and quietly devastating: a portrait of loneliness, the things a family will not name, and what happens when a long-buried secret finally reaches the person it was kept from.

“I wonder why people never say anything real.”

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