Very beautiful book about the relationship between mothers and daughters. Lovely writing. It came very close to getting five stars, but suffered because I read it quite soon after finishing Mothering Sunday, which although a very different book, also talks a lot about what makes writers become writers and I think Graham Swift did it slightly better.

And there were some very moving parts, which I didn't think Elizabeth Strout quite trusted the reader to get. Perhaps I wouldn't have got them all, but I didn't always like her pointing them out to me.
For example, there's a conversation between the narrator and her mother, where the narrator asks her mother if she loves her.
'When your eyes are closed,' she said.
'You love me when my eyes are closed?'
'When your eyes are closed,' she said.

The daughter is happy, but of course she never did get her mother to actually say the words, so it's also terribly sad too. I got that. But in the next paragraph the narrator says '...I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you...'

I just wasn't sure I wanted this pointed out to me. There are a few other instances of this.

But I'm being picky. The book was beautiful, sad and beautiful.