Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This Pulitzer Prize winner is really many small stories - most of lives of quiet desperation - all in the small Maine town where Olive taught math - all a part of her life or the butterfly wings that create the storms that blow us where we go. Many feel like folks you know or folks you are. Folks with secrets or small disappointments or struggling with the fear that their lives are hopelessly off track. Not a lot of sunshine here but there is the sense that the desire to survive can overcome most of the bumps in the road.