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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.
Anne Tyler returns to the auras of old families which she first explored in her novels of the mid-60's. Like the one in The Clock Winder (1972) the Peck clan of Baltimore is closed around nothing - bland, uniform, Peck-proud, decorously middle class. There will crop up, now and then, a few who might slip the leash, who want to get to the bottom of things. Like Duncan who inexplicably marries first cousin Justine, now middle-aged, lanky, weedy and a gifted reader of Tarot cards. Justine accompanies her grandfather, Daniel, in his search for that arch maverick, brother Caleb, who simply walked out in 1912 - shortly after posing for a photograph: in tones of brown, framed in gold. . . playing a violincello while seated in an open stable door twenty feet off the ground. While Justine examines familial connections as carefully as her cards, and Duncan restlessly moves from job to job, place to place, Caleb is found after Daniel's death. Perhaps Caleb's lifelong independent adventure was only a flight, or perhaps a pilgrimage. As Duncan points out, he was either very dumb or very smart. At the close Justine and Duncan (their daughter, a true Peck, has dissolved into the family landscape) make the final break, taking off with a carnival. Anne Tyler, like her Justine, is skilled in reading signs - from rings of molasses and catsup on a kitchen shelf, to the ghostly substance of old snapshots which hide as much as they state. Miss Tyler is at her most flighty - also twenty feet off the ground - but she always evolves the hardest of insights from the gentlest of people. (Kirkus Reviews)
