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In her stunning first novel, Amy and Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother-and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. And eating, sleeping, and working side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls doesn't help matters. But when Amy is discovered behind the steamed-up windows of a car with her math teacher, the vast and icy distance between mother and daughter becomes unbridgeable.

As news of the scandal reaches every ear, it is Isabelle who suffers from the harsh judgment of Shirley Falls, intensifying her shame about her own secret past. And as Amy seeks comfort elsewhere, she discovers the fragility of human happiness through other dramas, from the horror of a missing child to the trials of Fat Bev, the community peacemaker.

Witty and often profound, Amy and Isabelle confirms Elizabeth Strout as a powerful new talent.

Stephanie Roberts is a native of Washington State. She studied acting at Cornish College of the Arts and has been performing, writing, directing, and teaching theater in Seattle and throughout the country for over a decade.

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton, and the New York Times bestseller The Burgess Boys, as well as Abide with Me, a Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including the New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine.