A novel which has been made into a film starring Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis and William Hurt. How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life? Macon's attempts to do so are tragically and comically undone.
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...
OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD 'She's changed my perception on life' Anna Chancellor 'One of my favourite authors ' Liane Moriarty 'She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan 'Anne Tyler has no peer' Anita Shreve 'My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world' Nick Hornby 'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 'Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good' John Updike 'I love Anne Tyler' Anita Brookner 'Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour' Eudora Welty
**Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015** **Shortlisted for the Baileys Women''s Prize for Fiction 2015** **Sunday Times bestseller** ''It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...'' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959. The whole family on the porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. They''ve all come, even Denny, who can usually be relied on only to please himself. From that porch we spool back through three generations of the Whitshanks, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define who and what they are. And while all families like to believe they are special, round that kitchen table over all those years we also see played out our own hopes and fears, rivalries and tensions - the essential nature of family life. OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD
One day, during a family seaside holiday, something which has already begun to fray quietly snaps. Delia simply walks off the beach, away from her husband, Sam, and her three almost grown-up children. In a nearby town, she reinvents herself as a serious and independent-minded woman without ties.
Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, Michael was smitten. And in the fervour of World War II, they were hastily wed. But their marriage should never have taken place.
When Dorothy came back from the dead, Aaron noticed that some people simply ignored the fact; some seemed to have forgotten she'd died in the first place; and, others just walked straight on by. The accident that killed Dorothy - involving an oak tree, a sun porch and some elusive biscuits - leaves Aaron bereft and the house a wreck.
A novel that talks about belonging and otherness, about insiders and outsiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds.
