The Things We Never Say

Elizabeth Strout's "The Things We Never Say" follows Artie Dam, a 57-year-old high school history teacher in a small Massachusetts coastal town, whose outwardly settled life — a marriage, a job, a handful of quiet hobbies — is upended over the summer and autumn of 2024. An old family rift, stemming from a car accident involving his son years earlier, resurfaces; a near-drowning while boating leaves him with a fierce, unexpected will to live; and a revelation about his wife Evie forces him to reckon with how little he has ever really known the people closest to him.

A standalone novel — a departure from the interconnected Maine and New York settings of Strout's earlier work — it takes as its epigraph a line from Carl Jung on loneliness as the failure to communicate what matters, and follows that thread through a backdrop of contemporary political tension around the 2024 U.S. election. Critics have called it one of Strout's darkest and most overtly political books, and also one of her most emotionally exacting.

Published by Random House on May 5, 2026, the novel was longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. Kirkus Reviews called it "one of Strout's most profound novels yet"; other reviewers have praised its unflinching character work while noting its bleaker, more political register than her earlier fiction.