The Whitshanks rendered with such immediacy and texture that they might be our next-door neighbors.” -Los Angeles Times

“ Tyler has proved again and again that a chronicle of middle-class family life in Baltimore can illuminate the human condition as acutely as any novel of ideas, albeit with a more modest demeanor. “ Anne Tyler’s novels are invitations to spend time in the houses of the Baltimore neighborhood that she has built-house by house, block by block, word by word-over her long and bright career.” -Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books She’s a comic novelist, and a wise one.” -New York Times Book Review Her great gift is playing against the American dream, the dark side of which is the falsehood at its heart: that given hard work and good intentions, any family can attain the Norman Rockwell ideal of happiness. Tyler has a knack for turning sitcom situations into something far deeper and more moving.

Quintessential Anne Tyler, as well as quintessential American comedy. 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.

Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. “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.

A spool of blue thread ending