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Aingeala Flannery, author of The Amusements

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You Must Read This: Aingeala Flannery on My Name is Lucy Barton, a warm and poignant novel

Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton was published in 2016, and it’s the book I give to friends who say they love reading but can’t seem to finish a book. It’s a short novel told from the point of view of the eponymous heroine; a writer living in New York, remembering the 1980s when she was hospitalised with appendicitis and ended up spending nine weeks in isolation with a mysterious illness. It’s the height of the Aids epidemic in New York and visits from her husband and young daughters are curtailed. Lucy is alone until her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for years, shows up and keeps vigil by her bedside for five days and nights.

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