Digging to America

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, A Spool of Blue Thread, Redhead by the Side of the Road and Three Days in June. She has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction and was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'.

The view from America may be darkening, but Anne Tyler's new novel sheds a warm light on the ordinary human needs and actions that shore up American ideals of ethnic integration, neighbourliness and family values -- Terri Apter Times Literary Supplement Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel...her trademark blend of observant comedy and tragedy, and her window into the human heart, are gloriously apparent -- Elizabeth Buchan Daily Mail Deliciously funny and sharply observed -- Lisa Allardice Guardian Wise and funny...a multidimensional exploration of what it means to belong, not only to a family but also to a nation -- Lucy Hughes-Hallet Sunday Times Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous - its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility. So sure is her tone, so graceful her style, that the reader absorbs without literary indigestion a narrative constructed almost entirely of grand set pieces of domestic comedy... Articulated in her fine-grained prose, the pure kindliness of her finale expresses something of the forgotten goodness of the American dream -- Jane Shilling Sunday Telegraph