Olive Kitteridge
It's sold as a series of unrelated short stories with Olive acting as merely a connecting character throughout. That's not entirely true. It's really a novel or novella told episodically with Olive as the central character and regular dalliances into other characters' stories. That's a fine point, sure, but I wasn't expecting Olive to be so front-and-center throughout the book.
As a character, Olive was amazing — upright, imposing, candid with a vein of vulnerability — and I really liked the structure of the book. I liked reading about all these interesting people with Olive always, at the minimum, in the background. After Olive, my favorite character was the piano player who has to get a little tipsy in order to lose herself in the piano.
The story-telling and prose is solid, but the prose is not exemplary. I expect exemplary, florid or exacting prose in a Pullitzer Prize winning book. I expect to be in awe, surprised or delighted by an author's use of language, and I didn't get that. It may be that, coming off of The Stone Diaries, my expectations were too high, but I don't think so.
I definitely recommend it for the stories and characters, and I recommend it for the story-telling. Just not the prose. Or go in not expecting to be wow'd.