This was handed to me back in May, with a 'it is so good--you gotta read it' and the description that it was rather depressing. No surprise that I didn't actually start reading it until late September.
It is good, and I did enjoy it. It does qualify as somewhat depressing, as mortality figures into the arc of the book. It is a series of intertwined short stories, all set in the same small town. In the beginning, Olive is probably in her mid thirties. At the end, she's a widowed old woman. She's central to some of the stories, but hardly present in others. You meet men and women, old and young, at all sorts of different points in their lives. It made me think of 'Spoon River Anthology,' but it has been so many years since I read those poems, that this comparison is probably highly inaccurate.