Amy and Isabelle

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.

In prose that has merited comparisons to Anne Tyler and Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Strout evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother -- and parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets.