The Burgess Boys was published by Random House in 2013, and it represents Strout’s most ambitious engagement with the political and social realities of contemporary Maine. The novel centers on Jim and Bob Burgess, brothers from the fictional town of Shirley Falls (the same town as Amy and Isabelle). Jim is a prominent New York defense attorney, charming and self-important; Bob is a legal aid lawyer, bumbling and self-effacing, still scarred by the childhood accident that killed their father — an accident for which Bob may or may not have been responsible.
The brothers are summoned back to Shirley Falls when their nephew Zach — the socially awkward son of their sister Susan — throws a pig’s head into a Somali mosque. The act is simultaneously a hate crime and a confused adolescent gesture, and the legal and social consequences draw the brothers back into the family dynamics and small-town politics they thought they had escaped.
Strout uses the incident to explore several converging themes: the Somali immigrant community in Maine (a real phenomenon — thousands of Somalis settled in Lewiston and Portland in the early 2000s, provoking both welcome and backlash), the persistence of family guilt across generations, and the way that small-town identities follow people even when they leave. Jim and Bob have reinvented themselves in New York, but Shirley Falls has not forgotten who they were, and the return forces both brothers to confront the gap between their urban selves and their small-town origins.
The novel is structurally more conventional than Olive Kitteridge — a third-person narrative following multiple characters rather than a story cycle — but Strout’s gifts for observation and characterization are fully on display. The Somali characters are drawn with particular care; Strout avoids both idealization and condescension, presenting them as individuals rather than symbols.
Collecting The Burgess Boys
First edition (Random House, New York, 2013): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Later editions: $5–$10