A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler is one of my favourite writers and this is a delicious book. It is like being with a dear old friend. It is very specialAnne Tyler is the most natural of novelist… I know no other novelist who draws so directly from real life, and whose work remains so uncontaminated by the shortcuts and cliches of television and Hollywood… A Spool of Blue Thread may be her best yet * Daily Mail *One of the most accomplished writers working today… A must-read * Good Housekeeping *Exquisite * The Times *Her terrain is the family, and the micro-interactions between both its members and interlopers from without; her tone is superficially uncomplicated, her insights culmulative, her mode of realist fiction essentially conventional… its power derives from the restless depths beneath its unfractured surface * Guardian *Perfects the intimate, easy style that makes reading her such a pleasure * Metro *When it comes to painting a loving, funny and yet never simplistic portrait of American family life, Anne Tyler is, and always has been, the great mistress * Financial Times *Deftly written with skilful characterisation… A master of conversation * Daily Express *A rich and perceptive examination of uneven family relationships * Yorkshire Post *To step into an Anne Tyler novel is to inhabit a world that becomes more real and known than the one you live in. Her eye misses nothing – RACHEL JOYCE

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 and Redhead by the Side of the Road. 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.