Breathing Lessons

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, Back When We Were Grown-ups, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Clock Dance, Redhead by the Side of the Road and French Braid.In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; and in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

"A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing...Breathing Lessons is a pleasure to read" The Times "Breathing Lessons is a work of art" Guardian "Anne Tyler's characters are simultaneously funny and sad, heroic and pathetic and none more so than Maggie and Ira...you end up thinking you've known this family all your life" -- John O'Farrell "Her writing style is superb...there is humour...the dialogue both external and internal is fantastic" Savidge Reads "Displays her extraordinary gifts in supreme harmony: exquisite narrative clarity, faultless comic timing, and the Tyler trademark of happy-sad characters inspiring a mid-American domestic drama that somehow slips the surly bonds of the quotidian to becometimeless and universal" Guardian, Best 100 Novels of all time