By Euan Kerr 

Pulitzer prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout had long wanted to write about the Burgess family, a dysfunctional clan of two brothers and their sister, a single mom with a teenage son who does something terrible.

Strout said the characters came to her years ago, but the story unfolded slowly. “The Burgess Boys” emerged when she found a way to connect the characters to the growing Somali community in her home state of Maine, and the cultural and other conflicts that demographic change can set in motion.

“You have got three siblings that have lived very different lives,” she said. “And then of course there is the very real racial aspect of a dark skinned population moving into a state that has been traditionally the whitest state of all 50, and so in my mind that’s pretty big!”

On Saturday, Strout will meet in Minneapolis with members of the Somali community to talk about her latest book, which centers on a hate crime at a Somali mosque.

Strout said the story is based on something that happened in Maine in 2002.

“There was a real-life event of a man in Lewiston, Maine who threw a pig’s head through a mosque and it just seemed to completely coincide with what I needed to be doing with these Burgess boys,” she said. “So somehow the alchemy was right.”

Read more: Local Somalis cheer Elizabeth Strout’s

Source: MPR New