Anne Tyler

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1983 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1983 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 1982 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 30.33

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together—with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell….

The Accidental Tourist: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 1985 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 1986 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 1986 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• Score: 22.35

Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.

Breathing Lessons

Anne Tyler

• 1989 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 1988 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 16.39

Breathing Lessons is the wonderfully moving and surprising story of Ira and Maggie Moran. She’s impetuous, harum-scarum, easy-going; he’s competent, patient, seemingly infallible. They’ve been married for 28 years. Now, as they drive from their home in Baltimore to the funeral of Maggie’s best friend’s husband, Anne Tyler shows us all there is to know about a marriage—the expectations, the disappointments, the way children can create storms in a family, the way a wife and husband can fall in love all over again, the way nothing really changes.

Morgan's Passing

Anne Tyler

• 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 12.32

Morgan Gower works at Cullen’s hardware store in north Baltimore. He has seven daughters and a warmhearted wife, but as he journeys into the gray area of middle age, he finds his household growing tedious. Then Morgan meets two lovely young newlyweds under some rather extreme circumstances—and all three discover that no one’s heart is safe….

Digging to America: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 2007 Orange shortlist
• Score: 6.57

Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport – the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the instant babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate: an “arrival party” that from then on is repeated every year as the two families become more and more deeply intertwined. Even Maryam is drawn in—up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by Bitsy Donaldson’s recently widowed father, all the values she cherishes—her traditions, her privacy, her otherness–are suddenly threatened.

Ladder of Years: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 1996 Orange shortlist
• Score: 6.46

Anne Tyler tells the story of a 40-year-old woman, the mother of three almost-grown children, who on a sudden impulse walks away from her marriage, hitches a ride into the unknown, and settles in a strange new town to invent a new life.

What propels Delia Grinstead, the wife of a Baltimore physician, as she is spending another rainy vacation with husband, children, and assorted relatives? Is it old hurts and humiliations that surface this particular summer in the family-infested beach cottage? The feeling that she has become expendable? The memory, perhaps, of…