A Spool Of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler
Vintage Digital
<p><i><b>Anne Tyler’s</b>&nbsp;narrative spools back through three generations of Whitshanks, revealing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that shape a family.</i></p><p><i>"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959.&nbsp;</i>The whole family are on the porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. They’ve all come, even Denny, who can usually be relied on only to please himself.</p><p><i>"Tyler’s characterisation and her attention to descriptive detail are perfect: from the very opening of the novel we’re transported into the time and place of the story...This is a novel that entices tears of laughter and of sorrow from its readers. It is immensely engrossing; to read it is to sit on the house porch swing in Baltimore and absorb the story unfolding around you."</i>&nbsp; -&nbsp;&nbsp;<b>Julie Scanlon, The Conversation</b></p><p><b>Anne Tyler</b>&nbsp;<i>graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. She has published 20 novels, her debut novel being If Morning Ever Comes in (1964). Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.</i></p>