Book review: The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout

In The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout has created another exquistely memorable character who will stay with you long after you read the last page. To the outside world Artie Dam is an ordinary man living a pretty ordinary life. But Artie contains multitudes which reveal themselves over the novel’s 208 pages.

Elizabeth Strout is one of my favourite authors. If you haven’t read Oliver Kitteridge or the Lucy Barton series, pause reading this and add them to your list. But in The Things We Never Say, she has deviated from her usual universe of interconnected characters to bring us into the world of Artie Dam.

Artie spends his days teaching history to high school students who affectionately call him “Dam Dam”. Along the way, he also shares life lessons and kindnesses that many of them will remember long into adulthood. He’s been married to Evie for 30 years and gets along well with his colleagues and neighbours. He takes his sailing boat out regularly on Massachusetts Bay and has a grown-up son, Rob who he quietly adores.

But Artie’s outer appearance hides an inner self that feels lonely, sad and isolated. He wonders about ‘The Things We Never Say’. Why people don’t talk about what really matters. Why the world around him has gone mad. Strout has set the novel in the run-up to the 2024 US election, and she pulls no punches about the despair being felt by Artie and others around him at the prospect of Trump’s second term becoming a reality.

And then Artie learns a secret. One hidden from him for decades. One that could change everything. If he’s willing to let it. We watch as Artie vividly relives memory after memory that land differently with this new knowledge. And as the cracks in his family life widen and threaten to swallow him whole.

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge and other books of hers have been long and shortlisted by the Booker judges. So it’s no surprise to me that The Things We Never Say has been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. But irrespective of whether it’s shortlisted, or the eventual winner, I think it’s a beautiful novel that touched me profoundly and will certainly be read again.

Along with many of the books I read, I borrowed The Things We Never Say from my local library. But it’s also available from bookshops, including the charity Oxfam, which is Europe’s biggest retailer of second-hand books. For more book reviews, visit the Books section of my blog.