French Braid

This is her 24th novel: I have read every one… you read her for the eccentric characters, the pitch-perfect dialogue, the humour and the tiny ordinary moments so exquisitely described they bring tears to your eyes – Liane Moriarty * Daily Mail *
Deftly done: witty, poignant, wry - and sort of radical … Tyler’s genius lies in the subtlety with which she portrays her characters’ internal worlds … another Tyler forte is the focus on things unsaid and the tensions that spread out from these, across generations and even into communities – Lucy Atkins * Sunday Times *
Another masterclass by our greatest chronicler of family life … There are many authors today who try to emulate Anne Tyler’s technique, but none of them comes close to the lightness of touch, the accuracy of her ear, or the profundity of her vision – Craig Brown * Mail *
Any Tyler book is a gift. Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism – Anthony Cummins * Observer *
I’d put her in the same bracket as Ann Patchett or Elizabeth Strout. If you haven’t discovered her work and love those two writers, you absolutely must get stuck in * Viv Groskop, BBC Radio 4 Front Row *
A novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time … For all its charm, “French Braid” is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging – Jennifer Haigh * New York Times Book Review *
Entrancing… nobody writes better about families than Anne Tyler… [she] has that rare ability to do much with what seems little, to bring the ordinary and usually unregarded lives of ordinary people to life and make them matter – Allan Massie * Scotsman *
French Braid is a novel full of compassion for the human condition by a writer confident enough not to pin everything down and to trust her story to work its quiet magic – Rebecca Abrams * Financial Times *
Subtle and powerful … a multi-layered and masterly exercise in sympathy and understanding – Lucy Dallas * Times Literary Supplement *
Such a perfect work of fiction, you want to turn it over like a tapestry to see how it is done; how Tyler can sew gentle humour into a truly heart-wrenching story, and twist all of life’s hurts into a family saga that is ultimately life-affirming, and a brisk and thrilling read. We readers are so lucky a writer like Tyler exists – MEG MASON

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
• A Spool of Blue Thread
• Redhead by the Side of the Road
• Three Days in June

She has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as “the greatest novelist writing in English.”

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