Bates alumna's novel climbs bestseller list

Thursday, March 4, 1999 3:54 pm

The groundhog may not have seen his shadow this year, but he couldn't avoid hearing the mid-winter buzz about Portland native and 1977 Bates College graduate Elizabeth Strout's first novel, "Amy and Isabelle" (Random House, 1998). The book has climbed into the top 30 best Selling novels listed by The New York Times, who called it "one of those rare, invigorating books that takes an apparently familiar world and peers into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place."