Recovering from surgery in a New York hospital, Lucy Barton wakes to find her estranged mother at her bedside after years of silence. As they talk, Lucy revisits her impoverished rural childhood, her escape to the city, and the marriage and children she has since made — and begins to doubt the life she built, wondering what has been lost and what is still to be found. From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, it is a spare, luminous story of mothers and daughters.
Why it’s here: Lucy is younger in the hospital scenes, but she narrates as an older woman looking back — a reckoning with memory, motherhood, and the past that lands differently with age.
