The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION
THE WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN LONDON ON MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2026

This moving and deceptively understated book has at its core this assertion by its omniscient narrator:

‘So blind we humans are – so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone …But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own.’

The central character of The Things We Never Say, Artie Dam, a high school teacher in coastal Maine, sees his comfortable, well-ordered world (albeit one with the distant braying sounds of the Trump presidency becoming more strident) begin to fracture: first slowly, then with increasing speed. 

The book’s epigraph is taken from Jung:

‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of novels greatly admired for their profound and perceptive evocation of contemporary lives, including My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. Based in Maine, she has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, as well as for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. The judges of the 2026 Booker Prize described The Things We Never Say as ‘A devastating look at the dangerous cracks in family life and in the contemporary world at large. Strout’s prose is brilliantly understated and all the more powerful for that’.

Over three meetings we will discuss how Strout weaves the themes of grief, isolation, love and friendship into a seemingly simple story that speaks to us all about the essence of what it is to be human in the twenty-first century.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Three-meeting study led by Jane Wymark
• Mondays, 12, 19 & 26 January 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• £120.00 for three meetings, including background notes and resources
• The Things We Never Say is published by Viking, ISBN: 9780241814307 (N.B. the paperback edition is not due for publication until June 2027)