• Limerick City Library, Ireland
• Newcastle Libraries & Information Service, England
  
  
  

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in the Polish neighbourhood of Baltimore, he was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervour, they were hastily wed. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive and impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, and judgemental, proceeds deliberately. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll.

A 17-year-old daughter disappears, and some years later this fractious pair is forced to rescue her little boy, named Pagan, from drug-infested San Francisco, to take him home and raise him.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more deeply into the complex entanglements of family life in this marvellous, multifaceted novel.

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, USA in 1941. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet and Back When We Were Grownups. She lives in Baltimore, where her novels are set.