(Two families meet at the Baltimore airport while waiting. She also wrote and published many short stories. Tyler's other novels have been adapted as audiobooks, among them Digging to America, Knopf, 2006. Vinegar Girl (2016), a retelling of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, was written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. Tyler’s later works include Breathing Lessons (1988), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 Saint Maybe (1991) Ladder of Years (1995) A Patchwork Planet (1998) Digging to America (2006) The Beginner’s Goodbye (2012) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). Her highly successful novel The Accidental Tourist (1985) examines the life of a recently divorced man who writes travel guides for businessmen. Her smooth witty style and her descriptions of modern Southern life won her many readers, and her next novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), was a national best seller. Publication of The Tin Can Tree (1965), A Slipping-Down Life (1970 film 1999), and The Clock Winder (1972) followed, but it was not until the appearance of Celestial Navigation (1974) and Searching for Caleb (1975) that Tyler came to nationwide attention. Though it received little critical attention, it revealed the polished prose and understated examination of personal isolation and the difficulty of interpersonal communication that would also characterize her later work. It is a novel to cherish. ( From the publisher.Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. 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, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.īrimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler’s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.Ībby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness.

This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon.

Synopsis of a spool of blue thread