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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.
The remarkable Miss Tyler is again concerned (as in If Morning, Ever Comes) with the blessed and mysterious ways of gatherings and congregations - the company one chooses on one Journey of isolation; the home ties that bind or burn away; the quiet containments. Again settings stir nostalgia - a creaking wooden porch, the sun blanched fields, a working kitchen in tobacco country, a bus stop at a lonely small town drug store. As in the timeless memorial of a photograph, people at any moment are choosing or have made their choices. James, believing that his dislike of his father was the one pure emotion in his life, continues to make a home for Ansel, his weak, disagreeable and hypochondriac brother, and chooses to listen to Joan, who loves him. The neighbor, Mrs. Pike, sunk in guilt and grief with the death of her six-year-old daughter, decides to live out her days as a responsible mother for her ten-year-old son, Stephen. Joan returns to the Pikes unsure of James' love after an abortive escape to her parents. Drawn by the promise of love and hope, the runaways come back to what was somehow true and right, and at a neighborly party, pose for a photograph, bound together, but with each clutching separately his own glass of wine. Deceptively simple, hauntingly real, a glowing talent. (Kirkus Reviews)
