In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. All three were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the third won it. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). It is a novel to cherish. ( From the publisher.)Īnne Tyler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. 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, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.īrimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler’s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.Ībby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness.

This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959.

It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon.

A spool of blue thread review