Anything Is Possible

Anything Is Possible is a book of interlinked stories set in and around the small town of Amgash, Illinois, the place Lucy Barton left behind. Each chapter follows a different resident, and together they build a picture of a community where everyone is working out who they are and what other people mean to them.

The cast is varied and sharply drawn. Two sisters take very different paths: one gives up her self-respect to marry money, while the other discovers in a book a kindred spirit who changes the course of her life. A grown daughter still aches for her mother's love, yet slowly comes to accept that her mother has found happiness in another country.

Lucy Barton herself comes back after seventeen years away to see her siblings. Her return sets old family ties, long silences and the chance of reconciliation in motion. Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name Is Lucy Barton, writes with quiet compassion about loss, longing and the stubborn hope that people can still reach one another.

The book won the Story Prize. Readers who enjoyed My Name Is Lucy Barton will find the world around that novel opened up here, though it also stands on its own.