Awards
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Best Book (nominee)
The Man Booker Prize Best Novel (nominee)
The Sunday Times Bestseller Longlisted For The Man Booker Prize Shortlisted For The Baileys Women's Fiction 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..

x

sending on a journey as a bookray with no particular order - only because i cannot decide how to order it...

here are the potential readers / tentative order

sherlockfan - nz
keeta1 - nz - check before sending
edwardstreet - nz

au readers in alpha order - you can decide who to send to
billbooks - au
catsalive - au - ask before sending
jeniwren - au
jubby - au - near end of ray

happy reading
;)

*****edit july****
please please check with the person you are thinking of sending to - as there are a couple of copies doing the rounds in au-nz

happy reading
;)

Sorry Ladyindigo. Didn't log the arrival of this book which came one day last week. Loved your enclosed letter - I do like hearing from you. Thanks for the bookmark and stickies.
I'd forgotten about asking for this book and even now am not sure why I did. Anne Tyler is not on my favourites list and this book did not make me change that.

I've just sent a message to keeta1 and hope she replies quickly so if she doesn't want it right now I can give it to Edwardstreet who I hope to see at a BC meet-up this week. She is a smidge elusive right now though.

I can't quite decide if I liked this book or not but I can definitely say that on receipt I started to read it to see what it was like - 2 hours later I was still reading and I've found it quite page-turning and compulsive reading although I don't quite know why. Now that I've completed it I am bemused to think what kept me so enthralled. The characters were in the main somewhat complicated and not 100% like-able. Denny was totally inexplicable, loveable although not.
I can see why it might have reached the Booker Shortlist and know exactly why it did not win. Does that tell you anything about it? I don't know but then I find most Booker winners similarly bemusing.

It will move just as soon as I hear from Keeta1, one way or another.

Controlled release

Sending this to EdwardStreet. I can't locate a response from keeta1 although I have a feeling that I did hear from her that she doesn't want it right now. I do hope that ES won't mind checking with her. I am sending another book to ES anyway at it is her month in the Southern Cross Book Exchange. Sorry it has taken a while to move on from here.
Happens all too often alas.

Tyler's books are never a challenge, but they are always a profound examination of our ordinariness. Every family has its quirks and secrets. Being a house sitter I am coming to understand this more each new job. I love Tyler's gentle expose of middle class America. Always evocative of time and place.

OK, a surprise in the mail today, thank you Edwardstreet :)

I had actually let sherlockfan know that I was no longer taking part in the bookring, but as the book is here now, I'm happy to read it. I do have quite a few ahead of it though, so this isn't going to happen soon.

I'll PM billbooks to see if they're in a hurry for it.

An enjoyable read - quiet, calm and non-violent, as are most Anne Tyler books. Rather a pleasant change from the real world! I thought the ending of this one left you a bit up in the air.
Will be on it's way to billbooks in Australia in the next couple of days.
Thanks for sharing LadyIndigo :)

Travelling to Billbooks in Australia.
Happy reading!

Have got it got put away in a wrong pile shall move it to the top of my books to be read

Happy Birthday Catsalive

Happy birthday, Bill.

Sent to jubby for the October 2016 SCBE.

Greetings everyone!

Firstly, thank you LadyIndigo for adding me to this bookray. My husband has already spotted this book and announced he'd have given Anne Tyler the Nobel Prize over Bob Dylan (he's one of those people).

And than, thank you to the lovely Catsalive for sending this and several other wishlist books to me as part of The Southern Cross Book Exchange over on www.bookobsessed.com. You've been very generous and I do need to go and seriously update that wishlist now after you've granted so many of those 'wishes'.

To be honest, I've not read too many of Anne Tyler's books (after consulting the inner pages of this copy I can tell you I've read 3 of her latest works) and think she's a lovely writer who gets to the heart of human relationships.

So, I am looking forward to this.

Obviously, I'll pass this to my husband next, but where it ends up after that...?