“Olive Kitteridge” ended with its title character embarking on an unlikely but tender relationship with Jack Kennison. Henry David Thoreau, were he to stroll through Crosby, would not recognize its Dunkin’ Donuts, yet he’d be familiar with the anguished Yankee souls at its booths pondering their lives of quiet desperation over coffee and crullers. It’s a place where, on the surface, not much appears to happen, but there’s plenty going on behind the closed doors of the town’s old white clapboard and brick houses. This novel - which follows that same format - opens with the retired math teacher still living in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Me. “Olive, Again,” a simple title that the matter-of-fact Olive would approve of, picks up not long after we left her in Strout’s first book of interrelated stories. Olive Kitteridge, the deliciously funny and unforgettable miserabilist at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 novel that bore her name, fully deserves the sensitive and satisfying follow-up that Strout has written about her.

Readers, therefore, have every right to be treated to a second novel about another irascible yet sympathetic loner - but this time a headstrong woman.

And Albert Schmidt, Louis Begley’s aging, endearing snob, was the tonic who lent the fizz to “ About Schmidt” and two subsequent novels from 1996 to 2012. Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford’s stoic and droll protagonist, propelled four of Ford’s books, beginning with “ The Sportswriter” (1986) and ending with “ Let Me Be Frank With You” (2014). Aubyn, seized readers’ attention in no less than five autobiographical novels, published between 19. Patrick Melrose, the deeply troubled yet savagely witty character who was breathed into existence by the English author Edward St.

Jim tierney elizabeth strout