Zach, fatherless, friendless, fits the profile of the kid who turns a machine gun on his classmates, but instead he perpetrates a hate crime of the most monumental offensiveness, ignorance and ineptitude, rolling a half-frozen pig's head into a mosque during Ramadan. Perhaps if her daddy had lived she would have blossomed, but as it is, her husband has left her and she lives with her teenage son Zach, who precipitates the crisis of the novel.

Susan was a pretty child but nobody liked her very much. Then there is Susan, the third sibling, who has stayed behind in Shirley Falls. Jim is the golden boy to whom all the family looks for salvation: brother Bob, in contrast, works for legal aid, is divorced and childless. That case, later overshadowed by the OJ Simpson trial, launched him on a glittering career. The other reason for the Burgess family's local fame came later, when Jim, as the defence lawyer in the celebrity trial of a popular singer, obtained an acquittal. It was an event so terrible that the family has never spoken of it. Bob, disobeying strict instructions, had been fiddling with the gears. Then came the day their father left the children in the car for a few minutes while he fixed the mailbox, and it rolled down the hill and killed him. Until then, the Burgesses were a picture-perfect family who lived in a yellow house on top of a hill. They are remembered in their hometown of Shirley Falls for two reasons the first is that when they were children, little Bob caused the car accident that changed all their lives. The Burgess boys, Jim and Bob, are New York lawyers on the verge of mid-life crises. Shirley Falls represents many places where the manufacturing industry has died, the young people have left and newcomers, in this case Somali immigrants with memories of atrocities and loss, have made their homes. Among her greatest achievements is the creation of the fictional small town Shirley Falls, Maine, the setting for several of her works, including this remarkable novel.

She also works as a lawyer, and her expertise informs the plot of The Burgess Boys, where a legal drama is at the centre of the story.

E lizabeth Strout is a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer whose reputation has grown steadily since her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout