Book Synopsis**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER 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...**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**''Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing'' RachelTrade ReviewAnne Tyler is one of my favourite writers and this is a delicious book. It is like being with a dear old friend. It is very specialAnne Tyler is the most natural of novelist... I know no other novelist who draws so directly from real life, and whose work remains so uncontaminated by the shortcuts and cliches of television and Hollywood... A Spool of Blue Thread may be her best yet * Daily Mail *One of the most accomplished writers working today... A must-read * Good Housekeeping *Exquisite * The Times *Her terrain is the family, and the micro-interactions between both its members and interlopers from without; her tone is superficially uncomplicated, her insights culmulative, her mode of realist fiction essentially conventional... its power derives from the restless depths beneath its unfractured surface * Guardian *Perfects the intimate, easy style that makes reading her such a pleasure * Metro *When it comes to painting a loving, funny and yet never simplistic portrait of American family life, Anne Tyler is, and always has been, the great mistress * Financial Times *Deftly written with skilful characterisation... A master of conversation * Daily Express *A rich and perceptive examination of uneven family relationships * Yorkshire Post *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 *
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