Spool Of Blue Thread, A (Shortlisted For Man Booker Prize For

Description: The Sunday Times Bestseller Longlisted For The Man Booker Prize Shortlisted For The Baileys Women's Fiction Prize. 'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red's father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home..."One of my favourite authors." (Liane Moriarty). "She spins gold." (Elizabeth Buchan). "Anne Tyler has no peer." (Anita Shreve). "Anne Tyler is one of my favourite writers and this is a delicious book." (Rachel Joyce).

Review: "Tyler's twentieth novel finds fresh fictional riches in imaginative territory she has been exploring for half a century... Atmospherically rendered, the passage of time has both entertaining and heart-rending results. She has never written with more finesse, vitality and acuteness" Sunday Times, book of the year "I love Tyler's writing... She writes so beautifully and with such insight. Read her books and she can actually change your view, change how you see the world" -- Judy Finnigan Mail on Sunday "Exquisite" The Times "Tyler's sentences are wholly hers, instantly recognisable and impossible to duplicate" -- Hanya Yanigihara Observer, Books That Made Our Year 2015 "The extraordinary thing about her writing is the extent to which she makes one believe every word, deed and breath" -- Kate Kellaway Guardian "Tyler writes with an apparent effortlessness which conceals great art. The Whitshank family is tragic, comic, absurd, absorbing -- and lives on its illusions, as every family must. You'll shiver with recognition" -- Helen Dunmore Stylist "May be her best yet, though, to be honest, this is what I always tend to say after reading the latest Anne Tyler. I've now read it twice, and I may well read it again" -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday "Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing" -- Rachel Joyce Observer, Books That Made Our Year 2015 "The combination of direct appeal, subtle perception and unshowy artistry in Tyler's fiction has been admired by authors ranging from Joyce Carol Oates and Carol Shields to Jonathan Franzen and Sebastian Faulks... Her extraordinary gift for producing what seems less like fiction than actuality works wonders again... magnificent" -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times "Every sentence is perfect in this witty story of family life" Sun



Prizes: Shortlisted for Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015 and Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015.

Author Biography: Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and many other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Saint Maybe, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet, Back When We Were Grownups, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America and The Beginner's Goodbye. 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, which recognises a lifetime's achievement in books. In 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for both the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Vinegar Girl, is a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew.