When a bookstore celebrates its anniversary in half a century, it is always a reason to celebrate. That is why this Wednesday Documenta was packed to the rafters. But without underestimating this reason, I can assure you that there was another reason that convinced many people to go there, even though the rainy afternoon did not invite them to leave the house.

Since publishing Olive Kitteridge In 2008 –with which she won the Pulitzer and, later, the Llibreter prize–, the American Elizabeth Strout (Portland, Maine, 1956) has persisted in exploring his own fictional universe, populated by characters stunned by guilt and burdened by family setbacks, but also convinced that there must be some hope for tomorrow. Explain everything to me, published in Catalan, like the seven previous novels, in Edicions de 1984 –In her novels, translated on this occasion by Núria Busquet and Molist, Strout brings together the three great families of her sober and irremediably curious narrative about human beings: the Burgess brothers, the writer Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, who is now ninety years old. Despite living in a community of retirees, she refuses to leave that world.