Elizabeth Strout was compared to John Cheever, Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury, called “Richard Yates in a skirt” and even “American Chekhov”; it was published in The New Yorker and in Oprah Winfrey's O: The Oprah Magazine, was consistently included in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic and became a finalist for the prestigious literary awards PEN/Faulkner and the Orange Prize, and the novel " Olivia Kitteridge" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Excellent language, colorful characters, and unrelenting psychological tension ensured her books deserved success, starting immediately with her debut novel “Amy and Isabel,” which earned comparisons with Nabokov’s “Lolita” and was filmed by Oprah Winfrey’s television studio. So, the widow Isabel Goodrow brings her fifteen-year-old daughter Amy to her office so that she can work part-time under the constant supervision of her mother. They barely speak, and Amy's once beautiful golden hair has been cut off in an ugly way. Local gossips, with whom Isabel never made friends over many years of living in the town, are at a loss about what kind of black cat ran between Isabel and Amy. The fact is that Amy reacted too trustingly to the attention that her new mathematics teacher, the witty bearded man Mr. Robinson, showed her. At first, his attentions were quite innocent, and it might seem as if he was simply trying to talk and tame the young savage. Her mother is seriously concerned about her behavior, especially since a nine-year-old girl recently disappeared without a trace in the town...