CLOSED: Win 25 Anne Tyler books for 2025

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Extract: Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June

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Where to start reading Anne Tyler

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Where to start reading Anne Tyler's books

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Where to start reading Anne Tyler’s books

Three Days in June

Anne Tyler writes about decent, seemingly average people living average lives, without ever being boring – and for that we applaud her

Quietly magical... Tyler turns the stuff of everyday life — work, marriage, family — into something truly special

Tyler’s particular genius is for capturing the fullness of character and feeling in so few words

A masterly portrait of a divorced couple brought together by their daughter’s wedding... characters so alive they could be sitting next to you telling you what happened to them last Tuesday – and the ending is a beauty... a wise, wonderful book

Not one word is wasted in this sharp, witty novel

Anne Tyler’s latest novel is a joy to read as she once again transforms the problems of ordinary people living ordinary lives into something funny, touching and real

Perfect for diving into on a lazy afternoon

Independent, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

This novel goes down like a cold glass of wine on a warm summer’s afternoon… a wryly funny comedy of manners

Sublimely written and beautifully observed

What a perfect book to come out the day before Valentine's Day!

A wry, joyful tale, complete with a cupid-like cameo for a haughty cat

Anne Tyler is a novelist who always pleases. She treats her characters with respect and, usually, affection… Her books are intelligent and sympathetic

Witty, thoughtful and brilliantly character-driven

Tyler's sentences are wholly hers, instantly recognisable and impossible to duplicate

She knows all the secrets of the human heart

Anne Tyler tales the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing

Tyler writes with an apparent effortlessness which conceals great art

I can’t get enough of Anne Tyler… Her books feel homely and peaceful

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grown-ups, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Clock Dance, Redhead by the Side of the Road and French Braid. 
 
In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; and in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

‘Just relishable. Thank God for the balm of good writing’ NIGELLA LAWSON 
‘A wise, wonderful book’ OBSERVER 
'Razor sharp on family, love and marriage' DAVID NICHOLLS 
'I devoured it in one long lazy afternoon - I laughed and cried' VICTORIA HISLOP 
 
Weddings aren't just about the happy couple… A funny, touching, hopeful gem about love, marriage and second chances 
 
It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. 
 
First thing, she loses her job (or quits, depending who you ask). Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door looking for somewhere to stay. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories – and a cat looking for a new home. 
 
Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret which could throw the whole wedding into question… 
 
‘She is and always will be my favourite author’ LIANE MORIARTY 
 
'If Anne Tyler isn’t the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC R4 WOMAN'S HOUR 
 
‘She knows all the secrets of the human heart’ MONICA ALI 
 
‘My favourite writer’ NICK HORNBY 
 
'Anne Tyler really is the best' GRAHAM NORTON 
 
'Our greatest chronicler of family life' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Nobody does it better' VOGUE

The Tin Can Tree

Read Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's classic exploration of the impact of grief on a family. 
 
When young Janie Pike dies in a tragic accident, she leaves behind a family numbed with grief and torn with guilt and recrimination. In this compassionate and haunting novel Anne Tyler explores how each member of the family learns to face the future in their own way. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

A wholly individual writer of considerable stature

Her touch is deft, her perceptions keen, her ear for speech phenomenal. Her people are triumphantly alive

Miss Tyler is a writer whose special gift is to convey the richness, strangeness and unpredictability of seemingly everyday lives...She is a wholly individual writer and one of considerable stature

Earthly Possessions

'A skilful novel by a writer in full flight from the obvious' Observer 
 
For thirty-five year old Charlotte Emory, leaving her husband seems to offer the only way out from the mundaneness of every day life's earthly possessions and emotional complications. In the bank, she withdraws enough money to escape a life and a marriage gone sour. But Charlotte is about to escape in a way she never expected, as a young bank robber takes her hostage, and they head south for Florida in a stolen car. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world, is Anne Tyler... Brilliant, funny, sad and sensitive

A skilful novel by a writer in full flight from the obvious

The Clock Winder

'Her brilliance in capturing the ripples on the surface of family life gives her a claim to be the Jane Austen of our age' Daily Mail 
 
Having sacked her handyman, newly-widowed Mrs Emerson finds a replacement in Elizabeth, a lanky, awkward girl. The Emersons, with their seven adult children, have a reputation for craziness, and Elizabeth finds herself drawn into their disorderly lives against her will. But in the end it is hard to tell whether she is a victim of the needy Emersons, or the de facto ruler of the family. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Delicate, unpretentious and highly enjoyable

Tyler writes skilfully, with a detached air and a precise eye for detail

She writes with virtuosity, confidence and perfect insight and compassion

Searching For Caleb

Discover Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's deeply personal American historical epic. 
 
Duncan Peck is a restless man, always on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912 never to be seen again. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots, to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one... 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Family sagas have such an endless appeal that whenever one meets a really good one, like Anne Tyler's Searching for Caleb, one wonders why anyone bothers to write a different form of novel

Anne Tyler is a writer whose special gift is to convey the richness, strangeness and unpredicability of seemingly everyday lives

Celestial Navigation

Discover the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Sunday Times bestselling author

'A rich, revolutionary novel...she writes with virtuosity and perfect confidence, insight and compassion' The Times 
 
Jeremy is a child-like, painfully shy bachelor who has never left home. He lives on the third floor of his mother's boarding house and spends his days cutting up coloured paper to make small collages - until the day his mother dies and the beautiful Mary Tell arrives to turn his world upside down. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

A rich, revolutionary novel...she writes with virtuosity and perfect confidence, insight and compassion

Anne Tyler's talent is to make extraordinary characters entirely credible... So unfaltering is their story that every word is convincing

Tyler has created two characters at once entirely original and entirely convincing...a quiet but immensely strong novel, to admire and treasure

A Slipping Down Life

Read Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's raw exploration of the power of youth and fate. 
 
In a small Southern town, shy teenager Evie Decker becomes obsessed with local rock singer Bertram 'Drumstrings' Casey, and decides to take her life into her own hands. When she manages to meet him, she bursts out of her lonely shell and their two lives become unforgettably entwined. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Her brilliance in capturing the ripples on the surface of family life gives her a claim to be the Jane Austen of our age

Anne Tyler is inventive, funny and wise. Her fiction is magically alive to the quirks and coincidences of fate

Funny and lyrical and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design...rich...warm. The writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good

Miss Tyler never loses her control. She writes with virtuosity and perfect confidence, insight and compassion

In a small Southern town, shy teenager Evie Decker becomes obsessed with local rock singer Bertram 'Drumstrings' Casey, and decides to take her life into her own hands. When she manages to meet him, she bursts out of her lonely shell and their two lives become unforgettably entwined. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Morgan's Passing

Read Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's funny and uplifting exploration of what it is to be an outsider. 
 
Morgan Gower has an outsize hairy beard, an array of peculiar costumes and fantastic headwear, and a serious smoking habit. He likes to pretend to be other people - a jockey, a shipping magnate, a foreign art dealer - and he likes to do this more and more since his massive brood of daughters are all growing up, getting married and finding him embarrassing. Then comes his first dramatic encounter with Emily and Leon Meredith, and the start of an extraordinary obsession. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Tyler has created a world of imaginary people who are as tangible and as real as one's own friends and relatives

Alternatively lyrical and rambunctiously comic

An almost flawless story of love... Moran emerges as a true hero

Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good

Pure magic, a contemporary fairy tale that overflows with affection, mystery and laughter

If Morning Ever Comes

Ben Joe is the only boy in a family of six sisters, Mama and Gram. 
 
He is studying for a law degree in New York when he hears his eldest sister Joanne has left her husband and returned home with her baby girl. Out of a mixture of homesickness and duty Ben Joe returns to the home in which he has always felt like an outsider. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Funny, serious, touching, zany, delightful, revealing...a triumph of perception

Anne Tyler has won herself a devoted following. Rightly so: her novels are beautifully controlled, witty, subtle, with an undercurrent of human warmth

She is a writer who gets to the heart of the matter without being glib, and cleverly reveals the extraordinary in seemingly ordinary lives

Anne Tyler's touch is deft, her perceptions keen, her ear for speech phenomenal, her people triumphantly alive... Only a rarely talented novelist could have written this fine book

Her fiction is a quiet, gentle reminder of the goodness to be found in most ordinary lives

A Patchwork Planet

Tyler is a masterly writer whose love stories make you think as well as feel.

I was bowled over...I finished the book wishing it had been twice as long

I can think of no other writer whose novels I look forward to with such gleeful anticipation. A Patchwork Planet is her fourteenth book, but were it for fortieth, it would not be enough for me... A delight from beginning to end

Anne Tyler is inventive, funny and wise. Her fiction is magically alive to the quirks and coincidences of fate... [A Patchwork Planet] is charming, readable, and more full of touching and humane observations than many other novels you will read this year

A Patchwork Planet is thoroughly enjoyable...from this most responsive novel

Tyler's best book yet - which must make it pretty near perfection

Barnaby Gailtin has less in life than he once had. 
 
His ex-wife Natalie left him and their native Baltimore several years ago, taking their baby daughter Opal with her, and he has acquired an unalterably fixed position as the black sheep of the family in a family where black sheep aren't tolerated. Then the angelic Sophia enters his life and it seems as if all this is set to change. But can he shake off his past? 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Redhead by the Side of the Road

A perfect love story for imperfect peopleMicah Mortimer measures out his days running errands for work, maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7:15, every morning). He is in a long-term relationship with his woman friend Cassia, but they live apart. His carefully calibrated life is regular, steady, balanced. 
 
But then the order of things starts to tilt. Cassia is threatened with eviction, and when a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son, he is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle. 
 
Can Micah, a man to whom those around him always seem just out of reach, find a way back to his perfectly imperfect love story? 
 
**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020** 
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOKER PRIZE GEM** 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks

Bursting with vitality and variety, it's a tour de force . . . characters almost leap off the page with authenticity, speech and body language wonderfully caught

Tyler’s piercing omniscience is on full, enthralling display

A book this lovely feels practically heaven-sent…. Crisp and direct, yet full of subtle touches, it’s a big-hearted tale of roads not taken — a delight from start to finish

Anne Tyler really is the best. This reads as if she wrote it in one flawless seamless sitting. The sheer brilliance of making it all seem so effortless

Almost unbearably poignant . . . a moving and perceptive story about one man’s inability to connect with others and his gradual move towards greater self-fulfilment

Anne Tyler has the ability to take the minutiae of characters’ lives and say wise things about the human condition that other writers can only dream of

Tyler has every gift a great novelist needs: intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising. She has unembarrassed goodness as well. In this time of snark, preening, sub-tweeting and the showy torment of characters, we could use more Tyler

As always, Tyler is a magician, able to conjure up, in a handful of sentences, such endlessly complicated things as the comical messiness of family life . . . You finish her novels feeling closer to life, and closer to other people

Tyler rarely disappoints, but this is her best novel in some time – slender, unassuming, almost cautious in places, yet so very finely and energetically tuned, so apparently relaxed, almost flippantly so, but actually supremely sophisticated . . . Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here . . . In Micah, she’s created a man to puzzle and worry about, to ache and to root for

Tyler is a writer who compels not through the complexities of plot but by the precision of her observations, her perfect pitch in the music of unremarkable lives

A fully realised world full of dry humour . . . Each character is deftly drawn in a few lines . . . Tyler notes how each of us tries to create, with rules and little self-deceptions, the fragile edifice of a tolerable life. But also that sometimes we must smash it down in order to love

Tyler makes you feel she really understands human beings in all their self-centredness and haplessness… reading it did me as much good as a week’s holiday in the sun

The pre-eminent novelist of normal life . . . no one can match her evocation of the moments that build up a life

Tyler is a brilliant chronicler of human behavior because she understands that every part is something to someone . . . Yes, Micah Mortimer’s life is a small one, but as this period of extended quarantine and self-isolation is proving, whose isn’t? Though we have stripped our daily rituals down to their bare essentials, we remain as big and as loving and as scared and as frustratingly human as we were before the world outside screeched to a halt. Redhead By the Side of the Road is a delicate and moving reminder of this, and proves Tyler’s voice remains as vital as ever

No one alive writes with more accuracy or truth. Anne Tyler takes the reader to the very heart of a life

One of her best . . . Her intricate domestic dramas, full of melancholic, fractured families and lives suddenly disrupted by an unexpected event or longing, have a way of worming into your head and filling it with her humane vision. She writes with finesse, compassion and empathy about the raggedness of life

Comfort reading of the best sort – emotionally intelligent, finely detailed prose that leaves you feeling richer by the end of it

An excellent portrayal – amused but oddly tender – of a beta-male in crisis

Painfully poignant -- thank goodness Tyler is too warmhearted an artist not to give her sad-sack hero at least the possibility of a happy ending... Suffused with feeling and very moving

Tyler’s perfectly modulated, instantly enmeshing, heartrending, funny, and redemptive tale sweetly dramatizes the absurdities of flawed perception and the risks of rigidity

A new book from this wonderful writer is always a joy

Anne Tyler is magnificent as she explores how we shape our lives

Anne Tyler injects humour into this warm, sensitive novel…and her family portraits are, as always, vibrantly drawn

Who doesn’t love an offbeat love story? This one explores second chances, missteps and the importance of human connection. A touching celebration of the differences that make us all unique

A cracker… Tyler’s touch is so assured you are held by every word… a pleasurable novel about intangible disappointments

A pleasure to read. It’s fractured, sad, strange and beautiful at the same time – like unreal real life

The literary queen of family relationships

Tyler is an expert at writing about the human heart and relationships

Tyler has succeeded once more in lifting up what so often passes unseen in our lives and celebrating it

Neatly observed, thoroughly well-meaning, sharply attuned

Anne Tyler… is a remarkable writer. You might say she is like a landscape painter who keeps returning to the same scene in different weathers… her stories hold your interest and please because they are rooted in her curiosity about the way we live, feel and think. She is a masterly examiner of the unexamined life

Full of insight and sympathy. It is also highly absorbing — partly because of Tyler’s evocative style (when Micah considers his past, he is “visited by a kind of translucent scarf of a memory floating down upon him”), but mostly because of the intimacy with which she depicts the workings of Micah’s heart and mind...a quiet revelation

In wonderful prose, Tyler drills deep into a very ordinary life, familiar struggles, and a quiet heroism

Anne Tyler's masterful new novel asks what it might take for an unhappy man to change his life... her longevity means that her work has become a record of a certain kind of America, especially of "the dailiness of women's lives", for the past half century.

A quiet and beautiful story about human relationships, written with intent observation, empathy and humour

A timely reminder of what matters: kindness and love

This gloriously warm novel felt heaven-sent when it appeared in deepest lockdown

A new book from this wonderful writer is always a joy... Tyler packs feeling and insight into every single sentence

I adored Redhead by the Side of the Road... It is so subtle, and so brilliant as are all Tyler's novels... Witty and warm, its only fault was that I wanted it to be twice as long!

Compassionate and alert to the complexities in even the most ordinary lives, the book reminds us why, at 79, Tyler is held in such high regard

The qualities that have long won Tyler admiration and affection - wry humour, shrewd perception, characters who leap off the page with authenticity - are in generous supply

You can't go wrong with Anne Tyler. She makes it look easy creating characters that feel so believable, so three-dimensional

Tyler engrosses with the 'and-thenand-then' of domestic detail

I do think the world would probably be a better place if everyone read Anne Tyler . . . She's such a brilliantly empathetic writer - there's no 'them' and 'us' in Tyler's world - and she often writes from the perspective of the kind of people who you would walk past and barely notice in the street . . . Reading Tyler helps people to become better people, and I really fully believe that

Tyler's irresistibly readable 23rd novel follows Micah, a socially inept, OCD-ish IT man whose orderly life is turned upside down by the arrival of a son

Tyler's affectionate and quietly observant novel reveals her deep empathy for the hidden struggles of everyday lives

Another shrewd yet kindly novel about the mysterious business of family life by one of the world's great writers

Bursting with vitality and variety, it's a tour de force . . . fizzes with the qualities – characters who almost leap off the page with authenticity, speech and body language wonderfully caught – that, for more than half a century, have won her such admiration and affection

One of the most influential writers of her generation . . . Her books are so irresistibly readable that it's startling to realise what technical marvels they often are

**BOOK OF THE YEAR Sunday Times, Daily Express, Times, Daily Telegraph, Good Housekeeping, Metro, Spectator, New Statesman** 
 
The ultimate treat this festive season - a perfect love story for imperfect people. 
 
Micah Mortimer measures out his days running errands for work, maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7:15, every morning). He is in a long-term relationship with his woman friend Cassia, but they live apart. His carefully calibrated life is regular, steady, balanced. 
 
But then the order of things starts to tilt. Cassia is threatened with eviction, and when a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son, he is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle. 
 
Can Micah, a man to whom those around him always seem just out of reach, find a way back to his perfectly imperfect love story? 
 
**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Saint Maybe

'Compulsively readable, realistic, funny, touching' The Times 
 
When eighteen-year-old Ian Bedloe pricks the bubble of his family's optimistic self-deception, his brother Danny drives into a wall, his sister-in-law falls apart, and his parents age before his eyes. Consumed by guilt Ian finds the hope of forgiveness at the Church of the Second Chance, and leaves college to cope with the three children he has inherited and his own embarrassing religion. 
 
Twenty years on, Ian's prospects of a second chance are receding fast when, out of the heart of the domesticity that has engulfed him, strides a new figure who will bring him new life. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Anne Tyler likes to break America's heart, and she will do it again in Saint Maybe

Compulsively readable, realistic, funny, touching

Saint Maybe shows Anne Tyler at the peak of her power - a real slice of middle America, blessed with equal amounts of humour, pathos and compassion that will ensure heartfelt devotion from all her readers

A brilliant writer of emotionally sophisticated novels, funny, tragic, wise

The Beginner's Goodbye

A terrific writer... She's changed my perception on life'

Deeply rewarding novel about grief and hope, infused with gentle humour

A near flawless novel of love and loss ... exquisitely poignant but unsentimental

She's a master storyteller and inventor of character

This novel's great achievement is to capture the tensions and subtleties of a married life cut short… I read it virtually in one sitting, but that's a fairly common experience with Anne Tyler books… I didn't want it to end. Which is also a fairly common Tyler thing

Richer and more alive than the best work almost any other writer is producing

This is what Tyler does better than almost any contemporary writer. She peers at the forgotten areas of the everyday, the bits that are hard to pinpoint... She looks at people -- at life -- from the inside out.

Brilliantly observed and mercifully unsentimental

Yet again she has articulated the supreme difficulties of human communication in a calmly insightful exploration of love and truth, grief and reality.

Her stories are quite unlike anyone else's

Tyler writes with a generosity of spirit and an emotional truthfulness that makes you forget the bare mechanics of plot

A brilliantly observed and mercifully unsentimental examination of the emotional arc of grief

A perfectly judged and brilliantly executed novel of loss and recovery

A carefully observed study of grief and its trajectory

Tyler uses simple, elegant prose to manifest her particular brands of realism and humour

Such clear-eyed acceptance of life's fragility, and such a delicate way with it: this attitude lies behind all of Tyler's work

Tyler strips away layers of everyday life to reveal the abyss of pain underneath but does so with such skill and sparkling wit it makes this a real celebration of life.

A simple, subtle and really honest account of how one man, Aaron, deals with the darkly comic death of his dumpy, clever and brilliant wife Dorothy... I finished it in one sitting.

A perfectly judged and brilliantly executed novel of loss and recovery.

A funny, gently moving and insightful book.

What could be mawkish and cloying is gentle and touching, not least because she is a very funny writer.

In Tyler’s small slices of life there is poetry and wisdom...artistically subtle and emotionally satisfying

The ending teeters on the brink of sentimentality but such is her psychological insight, the truth of her writing, that if she says unlikely happy endings are possible, I believe her.

This meticulous, gently humorous novel is concerned with the effects of grief, the stop-start nature of moving on and the role of friendships, however imperfect, in facing catastrophe. [Tyler] remains as gimlet-eyed as ever in portraying ordinary lives that have become unmoored.

This novel's great achievement is to capture the tensions and subtleties of a married life cut short… I read [it] virtually in one sitting, but that's a fairly common experience with Anne Tyler books… I didn't want it to end. Which is also a fairly common Tyler thing.

The Beginner’s Goodbye is a very funny book … every incident is at once recognizably true to life and yet somehow utterly off-kilter.

Brims with wry perceptiveness and rueful humour

Tyler's playful humour imbues this unsentimental portrait of a mismatched marriage

A cleverly observed tale of an imperfect relationship and grief

A bittersweet, utterly beguiling story of love and loss from a brilliant writer

Both compelling and deeply touching, once you start reading you won’t want The Beginner’s Goodbye to end

It begins with one of those sentences that impels you to read on…Tyler’s haunting tale of love and loss is intelligent, unsentimental and often wryly funny

A lovely, stylish way to write a novel about marriage

A beautifully poignant portrait of marriage, loss and grief

Exhibit[s] all the delicious readability that admirers of Tyler expect

Both compelling and deeply touching, once you start reading you won't want The Beginner's Goodbye to end

An emotionally satisfying book with wise and moving moments

When Dorothy came back from the dead, it seemed to Aaron that some people simply didn't notice. 
 
The accident that killed Dorothy - involving an oak tree, a sun porch and some elusive biscuits - leaves Aaron bereft and the house a wreck. As those around him fuss and flap and bring him casserole after casserole, Aaron ploughs on. But then Dorothy starts to materialise in the oddest places. At first, she only comes for a short while, leaving Aaron longing for more. Gradually she stays for longer, and as they talk, they also bicker and the cracks that were present in their perfectly ordinary marriage start to reappear... 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Noah's Compass

'As exquisitely observed and quietly brilliant as the rest of Tyler's fiction' Guardian 
 
Liam Pennywell has spent most of his life dodging issues and skirting adventure when suddenly, in his sixty-first year, something happens that jolts him out of his certainty and leaves him with a frightening gap in his memory. 
 
In trying to piece together what took place on his first night in a new apartment, Liam finds instead an unusual woman with secrets of her own, and a late-flowering love that brings its own set of thorny problems... 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

As exquisitely observed and quietly brilliant as the rest of Tyler's fiction

Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous - its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility

Noah's Compass is immensely readable. It displays many of Tyler's finest qualities: her sharp observation of humanity, her wry comedy; the luminous accuracy of her descriptions... a novel by Anne Tyler is cause for celebration

Anne Tyler is a novelist who has elevated pitch-perfect observation of everyday detail into an art form... a beautifully subtle book, an elegant contemplation of what it means to be happy and the consequences of a defensive withdrawal from other people

One of my favourite authors, one of the very few I rush out to buy in hardback.

A brilliant writer... Funny, wise, tragic.

Anne Tyler

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