I’m looking forward to reading Tracy Winn‘s new book, Mrs. Somebody Somebody, a collection of linked stories set in Lowell, MA. I’ve read only the first couple of pages of the title story, which is set in 1947, but the first sentence is pretty great:
“Lucy Mattsen was nobody — like all the women I worked with — until the day the baby fell out the window.”
I think readers will likely compare it to Olive Kitteridge, another linked story collection set in a small New England town in the present and near past. But the title story made me think of an earlier Elizabeth Strout book, the novel Isabelle and Amy, which is set in a fictionalized New Hampshire mill town in the late sixties.