Elizabeth Strout's new book, like her famous Olivia Kitteridge, is a novel about a lost childhood. Each story in it is an intense drama, where at the center is a dark past and an almost hopeless present. If your childhood was spent in a home hell, with a rapist father, how hard will it be to live with this secret? Is it possible to forgive one’s own mother who failed to protect her from cruelty? One wrong word spoken in childhood can boomerang in the present, causing pain, shame and despair. The secrets you carefully keep can come out at any moment. In “When Anything Is Possible,” all the characters are dependent on their own past, and the present sets traps.