Books by Anne Tyler
(Please note: I am a lifelong fan of Anne and warmly recommend all the books listed below. I do not earn any commission on sales.)
Jump to:
French Braid ~ Redhead by the Side of the Road ~ Clock Dance ~ Vinegar Girl ~ A Spool of Blue Thread ~ The Beginner’s Goodbye ~ Noah’s Compass ~ Digging to America ~ The Amateur Marriage ~ Back When We Were Grownups ~ A Patchwork Planet ~ Ladder of Years ~ Saint Maybe ~ Breathing Lessons ~ The Accidental Tourist ~ Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ~ Morgan’s Passing ~ Earthly Possessions ~ Searching for Caleb ~ Celestial Navigation ~ The Clock Winder ~ A Slipping-Down Life ~ The Tin Can Tree ~ If Morning Ever Comes
French Braid
The story of the Garrett clan from 1959 through the pandemic of 2020. At the center of the tale is artist Mercy, who only wants to paint, but waits until her children are grown before gently detaching herself from her devoted husband Robin (whom she still loves). The Garretts through the years do not always like each other or choose to be close; as Mercy's daughter says to herself on a family holiday, watching her parents and siblings at the beach, "A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome." But through it all, happinesses and hidden wounds alike, unbreakable links are forged—even if nearly everything is left unsaid. The bonds binding them all together are inextricable, the braid of the title.
"accessible, comforting, driven by humanity" Sunday Times (UK)
"subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time" New York Times
Redhead By The Side Of The Road
Fortyish Micah Mortimer, owner of a one-man mobile computer repair service, is living for free in the basement of his building in return for maintenance. Most of his time is spent visiting his customers and doing odd jobs around the apartment block. His undemanding, kind-hearted teacher girlfriend, Cass, breaks off the relationship after Micah fails to ask her to move in with him when she is possibly in danger of eviction from her apartment. He is in any case distracted by a surprise visitor, a runaway rich-kid college student who believes Micah may be his father. Micah in helping to sort the situation out unexpectedly reconnects with the boy's mother, the woman he loved but drove away back in college.
"intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising...unembarrassed goodness" New York Times
"like all her work, it tenderly opens an ordinary life and shows us the universal truths hidden inside." Guardian (UK)
Clock Dance
The novel begins with what seem like rapidly whisking episodes in the life of Willa Drake at successive stages: as a child, as a college student, as a young wife and mother, then widow, and finally married for the second time and thinking she is at the end of her journey. Suddenly she receives a call to come and take charge of Cheryl, the young daughter of her son's ex-girlfriend, who has been taken to hospital. The girl is not her son's child, but Willa is summoned in the mistaken belief that she is the grandmother and impetuously obeys the summons anyway. She finds herself in a quirky, working-class Baltimore neighborhood unexpectedly enjoying her novel responsibilities. There are new friends and new relationships that seem to bring out the original Willa—as opposed to what she has become, a polite, conciliatory woman in expensive clothes married to a fussy lawyer—but should she stay and make her life in Baltimore when her husband is waiting for her at home?
"The tone flickers between humorous relish and sardonic shrewdness. Dialogue crackles with authenticity. Beneath it all is an insistence that it's never too soon to recognize how quickly life can speed by and never too late to make vitalizing changes" Sunday Times (UK)
"What keeps us glued are the lovely, intricate details; the depiction of human emotion as odd and splendid; and the tiny flickers of hope that feel like bursts of joy." Oprah Magazine
Vinegar Girl
In this modern reworking of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, twenty-nine-year-old Kate works as a preschool assistant in Baltimore while keeping house for her widowed father and flibbertigibbet younger sister Bunny. Although loved by the children in her class, Kate does and says what she likes and gets into trouble for being rude to the parents. Then her scientist father, desperate to keep his Eastern European lab assistant Pyotr from being deported, tries to persuade a reluctant Kate to marry him. Kate is half interested in Pyotr—but also smitten by a colleague at school.
"insists that it is possible, in spite of our customarily blind perversities, to find unexpected ways of breaking free from self-destruction" Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"an ingenious resetting…with considerably more humor and gentleness than in the Bard’s version" Washington Post
A Spool of Blue Thread
The story of three generations and their beautiful house, constructed by founder of the clan Junior Whitshank, and inherited by his son Redcliffe, wife Abby, and four children. The tale delves into the troubles experienced over the years by Red and Abby with their wayward son Denny, who suffers from a lifelong jealousy of his adopted brother. When the house is sold and the family scattered after a tragic death, the novel moves back in time to when Red's father Junior and his country mother Linnie Mae first meet and move into the lovingly built house; it ends as their grandson Denny starts life again on a more positive path—maybe.
"a knack for turning sitcom situations into something far deeper and more moving" New York Times
"infused with freshness and surprise—evidence, once again, that Tyler remains among the best chroniclers of family life this country has ever produced" Washington Post
The Beginner's Goodbye
Aaron Woolcott works in the family firm, a vanity publisher specializing in terrible amateur war memoirs and a Beginner's series: The Beginner's Wine Guide, The Beginner's Monthly Budget, The Beginner's Cancer. He has recently lost his stern young doctor wife Dorothy in a freak accident. Bereft, Aaron moves in with his spinster sister, brushing off people's well-meaning attempts at consolation and trying to lose himself in his work. Then Dorothy begins to appear to him in random locations. As they talk, and bicker, Aaron finally gets a chance to tell the seemingly no-nonsense Dorothy what she always wanted to hear, and to come to terms with his loving but misfit marriage.
"tight and as well-tuned as the BBC Philharmonic" Times (UK)
"one of the best books I've read about death and loss. As always, Anne Tyler doesn't explain the powers of emotion or tip you into despair. Instead, she peels back the layers to show her readers how grief works" New Zealand Herald
Noah's Compass
Sixty-year-old Liam is a detached sort of man living alone after two failed marriages that produced three daughters. On being made redundant from his lackluster job teaching in a second-rate school, Liam gets a smaller apartment in a modern block to economize. The morning after moving in he wakes up in hospital, with no memory of the intruder who apparently attacked him in his sleep. In an effort to recall what happened Liam scrapes acquaintance with a young woman who works as a "rememberer," assisting a forgetful old businessman with appointments and meetings; she seems to Liam to be someone who might help bring back the blank in his own memory. As he gradually falls for the rumpled, bespectacled Eunice he reflects on his painful past and starts to realign relations with his daughters. Life appears to be opening up—at least until Liam discovers that Eunice has been keeping a secret.
"inspired by passages of such divine loopiness you flip the book over, look long and deep at the author photo and suspect you've underestimated her all along" Globe and Mail (Canada)
"lovely and transparent as ever" Boston Globe
"offbeat delight" Oprah Magazine
Digging To America
Two families in Baltimore each adopt a Korean baby: the noisy, all-American Donaldsons, and the quieter, olive-skinned, Iranian-born Yazdans. The families become friends after meeting by chance at the airport as they wait to welcome the new arrivals, and through this chance encounter their histories—in the shape of widowed grandmother Maryam on the Iranian side, widowed grandfather Dave on the American side—eventually intertwine.
"comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous—its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility" Daily Telegraph (UK)
New York Times Bestseller
New York Times Notable Book
The Amateur Marriage
In a Polish, Catholic, working-class area in Baltimore, local residents are agog when a romance develops between their own handsome Michael Anton and the wonderfully pretty Pauline, who comes from a Protestant neighborhood nearby. They marry—despite Pauline's doubts almost at the very foot of the altar about how different they are, and how much they fight—and eventually have a family of three. They abandon downtown for the suburbs, but Pauline was right: they are too different, she emotional, impulsive, a bit glittery-eyed, and Michael cautious, judgmental, and set in his ways. While other couples learn to rub along, they simply cannot get the hang of each other: theirs is an amateur marriage, and over the decades the consequences of their mismatched union slowly unfold.
"rich and satisfying addition to the author's distinguished body of work" Chicago Tribune
"wise and observant" Miami Herald
Back When We Were Grown-ups
Rebecca Davitch throws parties for a living but, at fifty-three, she's also a widow who greatly misses her dead husband. As a timid, earnest young woman Rebecca ditched her staid fiancé to marry single parent Joe, and after his early death she has been left to bring up her daughter and stepdaughters in a crumbling Baltimore row house. It feels to Rebecca as if she has somehow mislaid her earlier, true self to become the forcedly cheerful, party-loving person she seemingly now is: the linchpin of a large and boisterous extended family of stepchildren, stepgrandchildren, an aged uncle-in-law and her close confidant, Joe's humorous younger brother. Wanting to rediscover her real self, she contacts her former sweetheart.
"It's a delightful gift to a heroine who attempted a new beginning for her life: an entirely open ending" New Yorker
"Stunning" Baltimore Sun
A Patchwork Planet
Barnaby, thirty, is the likable dropout son of the wealthy Gaitlin clan. His parents have never forgiven him for petty crimes he committed in the neighborhood as a teenage delinquent, and his wife has divorced him and wants him to stop visiting their daughter. Rather than join the family company Barnaby works for Rent-a-Back, a little business that does odd jobs for elderly or unwell clients. The Gaitlins have a family legend about an angel who suddenly arrives with a vital message, and when Barnaby meets blonde, schoolmarmish Sophia he wonders if she is his angel, come to reform his directionless existence. A romance develops and it seems that the imperturbable Sophia is turning Barnaby's life around – until Sophia's aunt accuses him of stealing money.
"delight from beginning to end" Observer (UK)
"Tyler is a masterly writer whose love stories make you think as well as feel" Sebastian Faulks
Ladder of Years
Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is a doctor's wife who feels increasingly irrelevant to her nearly grown family, and has begun to suspect that her husband Sam married her for the wrong reasons. After a spat with Sam at the beach during the family's annual vacation, Delia on a whim hitches a ride to a completely unknown town, still wearing only her skirted swimsuit, Sam's beach robe and a pair of espadrilles. Here she starts a new life, initially as the severe secretary Miss Grinstead with a room in a shabby boarding house, then slowly making more and more friends until she becomes a popular and well-known person in the little town. Delia eventually decides to go back just for her daughter's wedding, leaving behind the likable father, son and cat she is now housekeeper to. Enmeshed in a new life but still in thrall to her past, Delia finds herself taking up the reins in her former home and suddenly facing a difficult choice.
"every married-with-children woman's occasional secret fantasy" Globe and Mail (Canada)
"utterly charming" Canberra Times
"so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative and experience the work as something real and natural—even inevitable" New York Times
Saint Maybe
Ian Bedloe believes he has caused the death of his brother Danny; when Danny's wife dies too, he follows the advice of a well-meaning minister of a local sect, the Church of the Second Chance, and drops out of college in order to atone by bringing up Danny's children. As the years pass Ian becomes more and more involved with the church—much to the unease of his non-religious family—but continues to feel the burden of his responsibility for the children, even while loving them, and that God has not forgiven him. When the three children have finally grown up Ian feels that life has passed him by, but as the novel draws to a close he at last gets his own second chance.
"warm and generous novel, a novel that attests once again to Ms. Tyler's enormous gifts as a writer and her innate understanding of the mysteries of kinship and blood" New York Times
"at the peak of her power—a real slice of middle America, blessed with equal amounts of humor, pathos and compassion that will ensure heartfelt devotion from all her readers" Time Out (UK)
"deftness, humor and sympathetic understanding that we have come to expect from Tyler" Canberra Times
Breathing Lessons
Breathing Lessons takes place within the span of one hot summer's day as the bickering, long-married Ira and Maggie drive to a funeral. As the day progresses Maggie ruminates on her worries—their son's broken marriage, and how they never see their granddaughter—and at the same time harks back to her beginnings with Ira and their long decades together. Meanwhile, Ira mulls over what he perceives to be a failed and uneventful life, and how he married a woman who now drives him mad—a meddler and a muddler, too emotional, too talkative, and too slapdash. On the way back from the funeral Maggie persuades Ira to take a detour to see their former daughter-in-law, hoping to persuade her to come for a visit and perhaps reconcile with their son.
Pulitzer Prize winner, 1989
"a metaphor both for their 28-year marital odyssey, and for the halting, circuitous journey all of us make through life—away from and back to our family roots, out of innocence into sorrow, wisdom and loss" New York Times
"remarkable" Observer (UK)
"More powerful and moving than anything she has done " Los Angeles Times
The Accidental Tourist
The central character, Macon Leary, writes guidebooks for American businessmen who hate to travel. Macon's 12-year-old son Ethan has been murdered in a hold-up in a burger restaurant, and he and his wife Sarah have been left alone in their home in Baltimore. When she moves out, uncomforted by her husband, the grieving but self-contained Macon slowly descends into obsessive behavior. After breaking a leg he goes to recuperate with his eccentric siblings in the old family home. When Edward starts biting people Macon engages a dog trainer, the talkative, spiky-heeled Muriel, who lives a precarious existence with her sickly young son Alexander. A relationship slowly develops and Macon starts to feel more alive, although uncertain about his future with Muriel; nevertheless, he moves into their shabby home in a rough area of Baltimore, so unknown to Macon that it is almost a foreign country where he can be an entirely different person. Then Sarah decides to return to the marriage, confronting him with a terrible choice.
"Words fail me: one cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this" Washington Post Book World
"Brilliant, funny, sad and sensitive" Nick Hornby
"marvelous talent" Times (UK)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Single mother Pearl is raising her three children in a Baltimore row house—bad boy Cody, dreamy young Ezra, and their brittle little sister Jenny. Pearl has been abandoned by her husband Beck and must now work as a checkout clerk at a grocery store to support them all, feeling tense and unhappy and making the children miserable with her eruptions. When he grows up, Ezra starts the Homesick Restaurant, where he cooks what he thinks people might be homesick for: tacos, or gizzard soup "hot and garlicky" and made with love, or anything else Ezra feels would do them good, such as okra stew instead of the ham they actually ordered. He continually invites his family for meals in his restaurant that are never completed, always interrupted by someone walking off in a huff. When Ezra becomes engaged to one of his employees, the boyish Ruth, Cody's deep jealousy of his younger brother impels him to pursue Ruth precisely because she belongs to Ezra.
"Now, in her ninth novel, she has arrived, I think, at a new level of power" John Updike
"excellent" Canberra Times
"most rewarding and compassionate" Times (UK)
"gripping and wise, sardonic and affectionate" Times (UK)
Morgan's Passing
Morgan Gower is a forty-ish hardware store manager with a wealthy wife and seven daughters who live in a tall brick Colonial house in rarified north Baltimore. Morgan is a fantasist who tries out myriad imagined lives with the assistance of a wardrobe of disguises: sailor and soldier outfits, a riverboat-gambler costume, sombreros, pith helmets, a bowler hat. Pretending to be a doctor one day, he delivers the baby of young Emily and Leon Meredith on the back seat of his car, and they become friends. Over time, Morgan grows ever more obsessed with golden-haired Emily, finally falling hopelessly in love with her when he sees a series of luminous, magical photographs she has taken of members of his family.
"Pure magic, a contemporary fairy tale that overflows with affection, mystery and laughter" Washington Star
"witty, civilized, curious" New York Times
Earthly Possessions
Charlotte Emory, a 35-year-old mother of two living a quiet life in Maryland, is taken hostage at gunpoint during a bank robbery. Her captor is the inept Jake, a young drifter who takes Charlotte with him on the run as a bargaining chip in case he gets caught. Charlotte, who was actually in the process of withdrawing her savings to run away herself, seems happy to go along for the ride. She muses about her life and her marriage as she builds up some sort of relationship with both Jake and his teenaged pregnant girlfriend Mindy, whom they rescue from a home for unmarried mothers. Jake and Charlotte each find their own fate, with Charlotte finally understanding that there is no need for travel because she has been on a journey all her life.
"fierce and lyric witness...this guerrilla in diffident prose" New York Times
"remarkable talent" John Updike
Searching For Caleb
The story revolves around the Pecks, a rich, snobbish, self-absorbed family living in an exclusive part of Baltimore. The head of the family, elderly Daniel Peck, has left to go and live with his feckless grandchildren Justine and Duncan, Peck cousins who have married each other. Justine accompanies her grandfather Daniel as he travels about the country in search of his younger brother Caleb, who took off in 1912. Eventually the stultified, disapproving family back in Baltimore pay for a private detective to find the runaway, instigating a series of far-reaching events that leave the freewheeling Duncan and Justine facing a dramatic new stage in their lives.
"funny and lyric and true-seeming, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design" John Updike, New Yorker
"Wonderful book. Wonderful novelist" Washington Post
Abstracted artist Jeremy lives with his elderly mother in a narrow, dark, row house in the middle of Baltimore. Utterly focused on his art—collages and figures made from random objects—pale, anxious, agoraphobic Jeremy is barely able to function in real life and relies on his mother, who takes in boarders; when she dies, the boarders stay on and Jeremy continues his former existence. Then a new lodger arrives, beautiful, down-to-earth Mary, who has run away from her husband with her young daughter and tries to make money by machine-knitting socks. Jeremy is transfixed by Mary's beauty; they form a relationship and produce a multitude of children who fill the house. But Jeremy becomes increasingly distracted by the clamor and demands of domestic life, and is also angered when Mary starts treating him as just another child. Mary, in her turn, wants more commitment from the remote Jeremy, and is eventually driven to a desperate step.
"altogether stunning" National Observer
"A work of literature. A work of art" Washington Post
The Clock Winder
Rich Mrs. Emerson engages as her live-in handyman a young drifter called Elizabeth, a college dropout in dungarees who has a knack for mending things and also for attracting her employer's sons when they come to visit. Gradually Mrs. Emerson becomes more and more reliant on the cool and seemingly self-possessed Elizabeth, while two of her sons become downright obsessed, but for a long time Elizabeth stubbornly resists being sucked into fixing all their lives the way she rewinds the many clocks in the house. They act as a constant reminder that time is slipping by, and it is time, in the end, that effects a change: ultimately, she gives in to the Emersons' need for her to put things right for them.
"Gentle charm is the author's stock in trade" New York Times
"...delicate, unpretentious, and highly enjoyable” Daily Telegraph (UK)
A Slipping-Down Life
Evie Decker is a podgy, lonely, hopeless teenager who lives with her remote father; they have a brutally rude maid, Clotelia, who skimps her way through the domestic work in the house. Evie becomes obsessed with cool local rock singer Drumstrings Casey, and to get his attention she carves his surname onto her forehead with nail scissors (backward, from doing it facing the mirror). When Drum's manager realizes the resultant publicity could be good for business he invites the now infamous Evie to attend Drum's performances as his number one fan, and a relationship slowly develops between Evie and the singer.
"...wickedly clever, and perceptive about what makes people tick" Times (UK)
The Tin Can Tree
The Pikes, a country family living on the outskirts of a small town in North Carolina, have lost their little daughter Janie Rose in an accident, and The Tin Can Tree deals with the effects of the tragedy on both her family and close neighbors—in particular Simon, the dead child's now neglected and troubled ten-year-old brother. Hanging in the air is the future of the relationship between the children's adult cousin Joan, who lives with them, and their neighbor James, who feels he cannot abandon his self-centered and (maybe) chronically ill brother.
"...neatly captures the casual yet complex movement of Southern rural speech with its indirections and interruptions, its reticences and awkwardnesses which manage to express emotion" New York Times
“Miss Tyler writes unpretentiously and with a highly effective simplicity” Times (UK)
If Morning Ever Comes
The story of law student Ben Joe and his six sisters, one of whom has left her husband and taken her child back to the family home in a small town. Imagining himself responsible for his sisters as the head of the clan, Ben Joe leaves his studies at Columbia University to come home and investigate, only to face untold complexities: his widowed mother's chilliness, his sisters' self-reliance, his painful memories of an alcoholic father—and a renewed relationship with his first girlfriend Shelley.
"A triumph" Harpers
“This is a charming tale, mild and softly flowing” Times (UK)