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Elizabeth Strout’s 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, brings together Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess, all characters from Strout’s previous novels, following their lives and others’ in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Tell Me Everything traces the interactions between Bob and Lucy, who’ve built a friendship from their weekly walks along the river. (Lucy and her ex-husband, William, left New York for good when COVID-19 cases surged; and Bob is now married to Margaret, a minister.) Bob and Lucy share confidences and old puzzling stories, and after Bob introduces Lucy to Olive Kitteridge, Lucy visits Olive in her apartment, where they trade stories too. Olive plays a supporting role in the novel, but she gives voice to one of the novel’s themes: “Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded.”

Though the point of view dips into and out of many characters, the heart of Tell Me Everything is Bob Burgess. Bob faces late-midlife reckonings with his difficult brother, who blames Bob for a family tragedy; his troubled ex-wife, Pam; and Lucy, the friend who knows his secrets. When Bob, a lawyer, agrees to take on the case of a lonely man charged with murdering his mother (a woman that Bob, Olive and other characters remember from childhood, and not fondly), he lets this case take over his life. This murder mystery runs through the novel, adding a layer of darkness and propelling the action forward.

At the same time, Tell Me Everything is also a novel about all those unrecorded lives that Bob, Lucy, Olive and others share stories about, trying to find meaning and purpose in them. The narrative combines two of Strout’s preoccupations: the reverberating, intergenerational effects of poverty, and the power of connection and empathy, demonstrating how stories can illuminate our worst moments and commemorate our best.

Because it returns to beloved characters from My Name Is Lucy Barton, The Burgess Boys and Olive Kitteridge, and even includes cameos from Strout’s first two novels, Tell Me Everything may be most gratifying for Strout’s longtime fans. But these very human characters, with their specific yet universal questions about others’ lives and their own, are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.

The early 2020s have been marked by affliction, from the tragedy of COVID-19, to racism and police brutality, to a broad insensitivity toward others’ suffering. On the hopeful side, there have also been demonstrations of considerable love and support. Put that contrast into a novel, and exciting literature is the result. An excellent example is Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel.

Greenwell’s unnamed protagonist, a 40-ish gay poet, has had fraught relationships with family members, among them his estranged father, a lawyer who became rich through medical malpractice cases. But the narrator has found happiness with his partner, L, a university instructor with whom he lives in Iowa.

L and the narrator kept to themselves throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan is forced to change when the narrator develops stomach pain so agonizing that “on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” After initial reluctance, he goes to urgent care, where he hopes to receive a quick diagnosis and return home.

To his horror, they send him to the emergency room for imaging. When a doctor tells him, “I thought I was going to send you home with some antibiotics but you are much more interesting than that,” it’s only the beginning of a long hospital stay that includes invasive tests, endless IV bags and no certain diagnosis.

As in his previous novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Greenwell writes in long, discursive paragraphs that digress with philosophical asides. This book is ostensibly about the narrator’s ailment, but that’s really a construct that allows Greenwell to observe both the ills and the positive aspects of modern society, from insensitive nurses who belatedly answer the narrator’s distress call with “We do have other patients,” to the myopia that patriotism and religion can produce, to welcome gifts of generosity, most notably from a young nurse who treats the narrator as a person rather than a case study. At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.