Elizabeth Strout's remarkably assured debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, is an exquisitely nuanced exploration of the complex relationship between a single mother and her teenage daughter. Shy, sensitive Amy Goodrow leads a cloistered existence with her mother, Isabelle, in a small New England mill town. For years, Isabelle has stoically endured the emotional emptiness of her life and unfulfilling secretarial job, secure in the knowledge that "her real life would happen somewhere else." But when Amy falls in love with her high school math teacher and crosses the line between adolescent fantasy and disturbing reality, she releases Isabelle's intense shame about her own past and opens an unbridgeable distance between them.