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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 and Redhead by the Side of the Road. 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 Man Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Tyler's abiding theme is the ties that bind us to one another, whether we like it or not . . . French Braid is a novel full of compassion for the human condition by a writer confident enough not to pin everything down and to trust her story to work its quiet magic -- Rebecca Abrams * Financial Times * French Braid is a family saga of uncommon subtlety and grace, a novel which shows that, at 80, Anne Tyler is still amongst the very best writers around -- Alex Preston * Spectator * Subtle and powerful . . . a multi-layered and masterly exercise in sympathy and understanding -- Lucy Dallas * Times Literary Supplement * This is Tyler at her most Tyler-ish . . . Critics who write her off as folksy might remember that folk tales, with their dark hearts, endure longer and cut deeper than more sophisticated forms. So will the work of this beloved teller of secret, ordinary truths -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times * Any Tyler book is a gift. Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there's always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism -- Anthony Cummins * Observer *
