I loved The accidental tourist with its travel writer aiming to show American businessmen how to travel without feeing they’d left home – the antithesis of how Mr Gums and I like to travel.
Even so, it took me two weeks to read it …Īnne Tyler has created some memorable characters and/or situations. It’s a long time since I’ve read Tyler, but it turned out to be the perfect book for my current state of mind.
Unfortunately, she never did, but I picked it up as I sat by her bed on the last day of her life. She was finding the historical background really interesting, but she was keen to get onto Tyler whose books she’d read before.
She took A few right thinking men into hospital and read two-thirds of it before tiredness defeated her. Being the lexicographer she was, she loved The dictionary of lost words. So, for Easter, I gave her Pip Williams’ The dictionary of lost words for Mothers Day, I gave her Sulari Gentill’s A few right thinking men and Anna Goldsworthy’s Melting moments and, then, when she went into hospital, I bought her Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the side of the road. Although we didn’t know, then, how dire her health was, I did know that she was tired and needed good but not overly demanding or depressing reads. She has unembarrassed goodness as well.In the last couple of months of my Mum’s life I bought her a few novels that I thought would give her pleasure. Tyler has every gift a great novelist needs: intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising. a moving and perceptive story about one man's inability to connect with others and his gradual move towards greater self-fulfilment - Charlotte Heathcote * Sunday Express *Īnne Tyler has the ability to take the minutiae of characters' lives and say wise things about the human condition that other writers can only dream of * Stylist * You finish her novels feeling closer to life, and closer to other people - Craig Brown * Mail on Sunday *Īlmost unbearably poignant. fizzes with the qualities - characters who almost leap off the page with authenticity, speech and body language wonderfully caught - that, for more than half a century, have won her such admiration and affection - Peter Kemp * Sunday Times *Īs always, Tyler is a magician, able to conjure up, in a handful of sentences, such endlessly complicated things as the comical messiness of family life.
Bursting with vitality and variety, it's a tour de force.
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