Oh William!

“Oh, William!”—a Booker Prize finalist and the best book of the year according to The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, Vulture, and She Reads. Successful writer Lucy has been divorced from William for a long time, after living together for many years in marriage. Suddenly fate brings them together again. The ex-husband invites the heroine to travel with him to Maine to search for his sister, whose existence he only recently learned about. Despite the years of marriage and William’s huge experience as a writer, Lucy still finds him mysterious—like a book she never managed to read. Perhaps that’s what makes her accept the invitation. On the journey, the former spouses remember and discuss their early years together: the birth of their daughters, a painful divorce, and their new lives apart. They think about the reasons for their separation and about the forces that still, despite everything, firmly bind them. “I’d give up everything—my entire writerly success, everything—I’d give it all without blinking— in exchange for a strong family where the children know they are deeply loved, and the parents didn’t split and also love each other,” says Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winner for the cult novel “Olivia Kitteridge,” revealing those secrets of family life that loved ones keep from each other—and sometimes even from themselves.

Listen to the audio version of this wonderful, smart, and delicate story, full of skeletons in the closet, flashbacks, and humor, performed brilliantly by Natalia Kaznacheeva.