'Happily, A Spool of Blue Thread is a throwback to the meaty family dramas with which Tyler won her popularity in the 1980s.

The Whitshanks rendered with such immediacy and texture that they might be our next-door neighbors.' - Los Angeles Times 'Tyler has proved again and again that a chronicle of middle-class family life in Baltimore can illuminate the human condition as acutely as any novel of ideas, albeit with a more modest demeanor. 'Anne Tyler's novels are invitations to spend time in the houses of the Baltimore neighborhood that she has built-house by house, block by block, word by word-over her long and bright career.' -Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books She's a comic novelist, and a wise one.' - New York Times Book Review Her great gift is playing against the American dream, the dark side of which is the falsehood at its heart: that given hard work and good intentions, any family can attain the Norman Rockwell ideal of happiness. Tyler has a knack for turning sitcom situations into something far deeper and more moving. Quintessential Anne Tyler, as well as quintessential American comedy. ' This is how Abby Whitshank always describes the day she fell in love with Red in July 1959.įrom Red's parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, the Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part of the picture: Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. 'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. 'Among the best chroniclers of family life this country has ever produced.' - The Washington Post Description NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - MAN BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE - From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Clock Dance comes the story of four generations unfolding in and around the lovingly worn house that has always been the Whitshank family's anchor.

A spool of blue thread ending