Elizabeth Strout found the hero of her latest novel, The Things We Never Say, in an unlikely place. Well, actually, her friend did. “We’ve known each other forever, and he sent me a page of old obituaries that he found from, like, the Sixties and Seventies. It sounds weird, but whatever,” she tells me. “So I was looking at them and there was this man’s face that was so ordinary and kind and pleasant, and just as ordinary as a face could be.”

The man’s face stayed with her, until one day she realised this was Artie Dam, an unassuming history teacher in late middle age whose life was full of secrets. After crochety Olive Kitteridge, who won Strout the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and quiet, courageous Lucy Barton, who Laura Linney played at London’s Bridge Theatre in 2018, Artie is Strout’s first major new protagonist for many years, in her first novel set outside of her native Maine. “He was just so quotidian-looking, you know?” says Strout, 70.

“Quotidian” is a word often used to describe the charm of Strout’s books, which have sold over two million copies around the world. They revel in seemingly unremarkable lives, communities where people come and go, harbouring secret grudges and passions, suffocating in private shame or plagued by a sense of loneliness and disconnection. Literary heavyweights from Hilary Mantel to Elena Ferrante to Zadie Smith have praised her work, but what moves her the most are the shy, shaky readers who queue up to meet her in book signing lines and whisper about what her novels have meant to them. A nervous Italian woman once told her, through an interpreter, “You have seen into my soul.”

The New Yorker described Strout’s fiction as “both cosy and eerie, as comforting and unsettling as a fairy tale”. That’s true of the story of Artie Dam; he’s a respected teacher, a loyal husband, caring father and good friend, but he’s also dogged by thoughts of suicide. A moral man troubled by the political direction of his country, he’s lost the ability to make small talk at dinner parties, inviting bewildered looks as he tries to initiate discussions about free will. “I wonder why people never say anything real,” he wonders aloud to his wife after one depressing social event.

At the heart of the novel is a revelation that shifts the ground underneath Artie’s feet, suddenly turning those closest to him into strangers. One of the only people he can really talk to is an old friend called Ken Moynihan – who turns out, to Artie’s surprise, to be a Republican. Does Strout have Republican friends? “Yes. I have a very, very good friend – who sent me that obituary,” she says. She and her friend get around their political differences by ignoring them, just like Artie and Ken. “We simply never talked about it,” she tells me, adding that she has seen “families where there are very deep fractures” because of the febrile state of American politics.

The Things We Never Say was written in the lead-up to Trump’s second presidential victory, and the result of the election is a dividing line in the novel, after which the world around Artie seems to slowly start to degrade. When I asked if Strout’s famous empathy extends to the president, she’s blunt. “No.” In America, she says, “there are many rumblings and divides, and I have no idea how it will turn out”.

It’s a political novel, and, like many of Strout’s books, a desperately sad one. She says she didn’t realise how sad until she read it back. Loneliness hums through her stories like a low, blinking lightbulb. Does she often feel lonely herself? “I was thinking just the other day – I don’t actually feel lonely. I mean sometimes, once in a while, I think, ‘Oh, I feel so lonely.’ But that’s very rare. But I’m aware that it’s a theme in my work and so I think I must be plugging into the isolation that we all have just by being inside our own selves and our own bodies, and bumping up against each other, trying to have these moments of grace.”

Her novels are full of that strange incongruousness. There’s something hypnotic about her spare prose, her homely, wise storytelling, which lures you into a false sense of security until it pierces you with a moment of unflinching emotional insight. Conversation with her is like this, too. Appearing on my screen in tortoise shell glasses, wearing a pink scarf, her blonde hair pinned back, she’s matter-of-fact. She doesn’t elaborate if she doesn’t want to, but almost glimmers with a sense of fascination about other people. “All my life, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to know: what it feels like to be another person, just even for five minutes. So I guess I have to make them up in order to know.”

All my life, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to know: what it feels like to be another person, just even for five minutes

Strout grew up in Maine, where her father was a professor and her mother an English teacher. It wasn’t until the age of 42 that Strout published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, about a single mother living in a small town with her daughter, who has been groomed by a teacher. By the time it was published, she had a teenage daughter of her own. Influenced by William Trevor, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf (she used to re-read Mrs Dalloway once a year) and Russian writers from Tolstoy to Chekhov, Strout worked at a number of jobs, from waitressing to temping as a secretary to training to be a lawyer, and kept writing all the while.

Her imagination was able to flourish, she thinks, because she “grew up with a background of such stillness”. Her childhood home was in “the middle of nowhere”, and her parents didn’t believe in having a TV. “My daughter used to joke, ‘Mum lived through the Sixties, but she missed it,’” she laughs. “I look back and think that was actually helpful for me as a writer, because my mind just kept doing whatever it needed to do. I would read and be outside by myself all the time. But I don’t see young people having that sense of quietness within them. And I don’t know what that will lead to.”

Part of Artie’s disillusionment in The Things We Never Say is the creeping arrival of AI in the classroom, as students start to use it in their work. Strout herself isn’t very “online”. (“I mean, I’m on email…”) Back when she used to ride the subway in New York, she’d see people reading everywhere – now she notices most people walk around on their phones. “They must not be reading like they used to,” she wonders.

In her twenties, before studying law, Strout lived in Oxford for a year, working in The King’s Arms pub. It was in England that she says she noticed class differences “in a way that I’d been unaware of in America”. Class has been a rich seam in her stories, “because it’s just part of the fabric of life”. She quotes something that her character Lucy Barton says: “I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.” Strout suggests, “That’s just what happens with class, whether it’s British or American. And it’s just so sad. And it’s there all the time.”

When she was forging her early writing career, Strout was juggling jobs with life as a new mother. For over 10 years, she taught at a community college, with some classes starting at 7am, so she could be at home with her daughter when she finished school, and might get two hours to write every other day. “It’s a tough thing to be creative and have children. I think especially for women, I’m sorry to say that, but I think the women issue is still very real, you know?”

She means the practicalities. “I don’t know, I mean I’m old now so I don’t know what’s going on with younger people necessarily, but I think that still it’s probably easier for men to say, ‘I am a writer and I am going to go inside this room and close the door for four hours and just do that.’” Did Strout ever do that? “No, I never did that. I never took myself away from her if she was home,” she says. “I’d been trying to write for all those years, and I think there’s some connection between the fact my daughter was almost about to leave the house by the time Amy and Isabelle came out. Then I was just publishing a lot. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

Since then, that career has included spots on both the Booker Prize and Women’s Prize shortlists, and a handful of major screen adaptations. Olive Kitteridge was adapted into an acclaimed but underwatched HBO miniseries in 2014 (although it won several Emmys, including for its starry cast, including Frances McDormand and Bill Murray). Strout says there is a plan in the works to adapt The Things We Never Say; she mentions her first choice for the role of Artie with some regret. “I just keep thinking of poor Philip Seymour Hoffman [the actor who died in 2014],” she says. She had several meetings with Robert Redford before his death, after the actor bought the rights for her 2013 novel The Burgess Boys. “I liked him, but it didn’t get done.”

Last year, Strout brought Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess from The Burgess Boys together for a kind of Avengers Assemble of the Strout-iverse in her Women’s Prize shortlisted Tell Me Everything. She thinks that will be the last time she writes about Olive, her most beloved protagonist. “I feel that I’m done with her, but I have said that so many times and been wrong, so I honestly don’t dare say it.” Artie Dam’s story, she always knew, would be told in just one novel.

How many books does she have left in her? “Probably one,” she says decisively. “I was waiting for a while and I thought, ‘Oh, wow, I’m actually done,’ but there’s a bit of bubbling going on, so we’ll see.” No more Elizabeth Strout novels; it’s a shattering thought. “I feel that I’ve probably pretty much said what I need to say, or given my readers what I can. I don’t want to be one of those writers that continues with stuff that’s not as good.” She shrugs. “I might just be exhausted. I might just have said it all, you know?”

‘The Things We Never Say’ is published by Penguin Viking