Travel Bug Book Group • The Things We Never Say

_The Things We Never Say_ By Elizabeth Strout • Purchase Online from Travel Bug • Or the audiobook from Libro “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.” —Carl Jung Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout's new novel, “The Things We Never Say”, tells the story of a chance incident that sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher's life-a poignant meditation on loneliness, friendship, parenthood, and the importance of truth in a capsizing world. Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad-at himself and the people around him-and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us? “She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of ... Strout’s scene-setting is brilliantly terse and precise ... Complex and layered.” —Adam Begley The Atlantic “This is a deeply existential novel, preoccupied with secrecy, loneliness and the limits of understanding. Strout is brilliant at uncovering what goes on beneath the surface of ordinary life ... Feels like Strout’s most sobering novel yet: slow-burning, elegiac and deceptively simple, despite its layering of motifs and ideas.” — Johanna…