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Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964 whilst her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1994, Tyler was nominated 'the greatest living novelist writing in English' by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
How do impossible couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a fairly chilly man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together for reasons the rest of the world would never guess. One can leave the principality of self to tour another's - to love the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her. Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose concern was how to pretend they had never left home - who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel without a jolt. Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains unchanged, who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with - two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose - in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the impossible Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in another country of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a vast distance from everyone who mattered and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have used each other up, Macon will find in foreignness his own soft heart. Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date. (Kirkus Reviews)
