Anything Is Possible cover art

Anything Is Possible

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Anything Is Possible

By: Elizabeth Strout
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout, read by Kimberly Farr.

An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss from the number one New York Times best-selling and Man Booker long-listed author of My Name Is Lucy Barton

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.

Anything Is Possible tells the story of the inhabitants of rural, dusty Amgash, Illinois, the hometown of Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer who finally returns, after 17 years of absence, to visit the siblings she left behind. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors.

©2017 Elizabeth Strout (P)2017 Penguin Audio Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Amy and Isabelle cover art
Olive Kitteridge cover art
Abide with Me cover art
'Round Midnight cover art
Into the Wilderness cover art
After All These Years cover art
Heft cover art
My Brilliant Friend cover art
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey cover art
A Prayer for Owen Meany cover art
Florence Grace cover art
The Lost Language of Cranes cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
All these stories are interconnected and build on the first of the Amgash books ‘My name is Lucy Barton’
Very clever in its construction and so moving.
Cannot wait to start on the next: ‘Oh William’.

Lovely collection of short stories

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Elizabeth Strout has a unique ability to create a whole world of detailed and emotional characters that you can just follow throughout the series of books. While you see much less of Lucy Barton in this book, we see how her family members and people in her community have fared. It seems to me like a modern day To Kill a Mockingbird, especially the part about poverty in areas of America. I'm looking forward to reading the next part.

An intricately beautiful collection of characters

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This outstanding novel by Elizabeth Strout can’t be categorised or compared to any other and deserves more than its 5 stars. The brilliance of such a subtle work is difficult to describe because words in comparison with the author’s can sound banal. My Name is Lucy Barton is Strout’s previous novel published just 18 months ago, and Lucy who left her small-town community of Amagash in Illinois to become a writer in New York is a presence throughout and makes a fleeting, achingly sad appearance late on in the novel.

Anything is Possible doesn’t follow any conventional structure but is a collection of scenes (they’re not really stories): insights into the lives of people who are gradually revealed to be inter-related. As in real life, an outsider (including us as listeners) can never know the whole truth: ‘Who knew? Who knew?’ muses one on hearing of the ghastly reality of another’s marriage. These are glimpses of brilliant illumination into outwardly ordinary lives, into loneliness, misunderstanding, harboured hurt, resilience… Home is not a place of comfort and closeness but of difficulties and pain; warmth, friendship and kindness – those things which are ‘possible’ – come from strangers and at unexpected moments. And just as in real life, conversations juxtapose seamlessly the dreadful (concentration camps, incest, voyeurism) with the apparently trivial (who’s piled on the pounds).

You cannot but believe that these are real people who are gradually revealed to you. They have carried the burden of their childhoods, sneeringly described by some as having ‘come from nothing’; they have eaten from dumpsters and suffered harsh and apparently cruel parents, themselves dogged by their own inadequacies and misfortunes. The strength of the novel is in the shifting perspectives so no-one is merely what we see or hear, as in the mother who left her children to live with an Italian old enough to be her son decades later reunited with her favourite damaged grown-up daughter. The details are piercingly perceptive. Lucy Barton’s long estranged brother Peter buys a new rug for his shabby home for his sister’s visit and afterwards its insistent brightness emphasises all the pathos of the failed occasion.

The narration is just right – Kimberley Farr makes a superb job of letting these real people breathe on their own. As so much is people speaking, Anything is Possible is a gift for audio, but it will also send you to the book to ensure that you savour every word.

Who can ever know?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book features the characters in the Lucy Barton series. It is a collection of short stories about how some of their lives are intertwined.
I really enjoyed the story telling of these characters and their families.
I also enjoyed the narrator.

Lovely collection of short stories

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I enjoyed this book i have read Olive, Olive again and Lucy Barton also. They are all familiar and connected. Nice relaxing read.

Engaging

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An enjoyable novel as we get to know people who are linked together in some way. Great insight into how our past can effect us in a very rounded and non stereotypical way. Really wonderful people who are lovely to get to know. Explores aspects of shame and snobbery, with some sense of humour. I had not expected it to end (a result of not having an actual book and not looking at the chapters) so was most dismayed to find that there was no more to this tale. So could have had more!

A good and thoughtful read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book reveals lives not often given space, the underclass in USA. Poor whites with children so hungry they eat from the garbage. Seen with compassion, unsentimental & humorous , I read the stories twice to appreciate the patchwork of human experience described.

Intriguing, deeply meaningful, delightful.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Entertaining, loved the characters, slow pace may frustrate some but it added to my enjoyment. One couple maybe a bit too bizarre but generally a great listen and wonderful characters.

Loved it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Do read all the other reviews, some are very erudite, mostly all extremely positive. This book really moved me. It is so heart rending. In my view even better than My Name Is Lucy Barton and Oh William. The lives of all the characters are written about so poignantly by Elisabeth Strout. Great narration.

Heart rending

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A series of interlinked short stories. Some say it’s better to have read the author’s earlier book about an author who makes good after a deprived childhood in the small community which provides the central link for these stories. i haven’t read that but still loved these beautifully written stories and beautifully read stories.

beautifully written

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews