Redhead by the Side of the Road

Bursting with vitality and variety, it’s a tour de force … characters almost leap off the page with authenticity, speech and body language wonderfully caught * Sunday Times *Tyler’s piercing omniscience is on full, enthralling display * Vanity Fair *A book this lovely feels practically heaven-sent…. Crisp and direct, yet full of subtle touches, it’s a big-hearted tale of roads not taken — a delight from start to finish * Daily Mail *Anne Tyler really is the best. This reads as if she wrote it in one flawless seamless sitting. The sheer brilliance of making it all seem so effortless – Graham NortonAlmost unbearably poignant … a moving and perceptive story about one man’s inability to connect with others and his gradual move towards greater self-fulfilment * Sunday Express *Anne Tyler has the ability to take the minutiae of characters’ lives and say wise things about the human condition that other writers can only dream of * Stylist *Tyler has every gift a great novelist needs: intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising. She has unembarrassed goodness as well. In this time of snark, preening, sub-tweeting and the showy torment of characters, we could use more Tyler – Amy Bloom * New York Times *As always, Tyler is a magician, able to conjure up, in a handful of sentences, such endlessly complicated things as the comical messiness of family life … You finish her novels feeling closer to life, and closer to other people – Craig Brown * Mail on Sunday *Tyler rarely disappoints, but this is her best novel in some time – slender, unassuming, almost cautious in places, yet so very finely and energetically tuned, so apparently relaxed, almost flippantly so, but actually supremely sophisticated … Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here … In Micah, she’s created a man to puzzle and worry about, to ache and to root for – Julie Myerson * Observer *Tyler is a writer who compels not through the complexities of plot but by the precision of her observations, her perfect pitch in the music of unremarkable lives – Clare Clark * Guardian *

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, Redhead by the Side of the Road and French Braid. 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 Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

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