Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family. Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details. “ French Braid is a moving meditation on the passage of time. Named Best Book of the Year by Oprah Daily Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.įull of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close-yet how unknowable-every family is to itself.Ī NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common.

Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin.

They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. “A quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging.” - The New York Times Book Review

From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread-a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild.

It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations. Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that form s the Garretts' family life over the decades, whether that's a painstaking Easter lunch or giving a child a ride, a fateful train journey or an unexpected homecoming.Īnd it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake. Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. The major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author - a brilliantly perceptive, painfully true and funny journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today.

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