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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
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Published: 24/03/2022
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ISBN: 9781784744625
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Length: 256 Pages
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Dimensions: 240mm x 26mm x 162mm
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Weight: 461g
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RRP: £16.99
French Braid
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The Sunday Times Bestseller
THE MAJOR NEW NOVEL FROM ONE OF THE GREATEST STORYTELLERS OF OUR TIME
A brilliantly perceptive, painfully true and funny journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today
When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone is determined not to notice.
Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won't allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.
Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts' family life over the decades, whether that's a painstaking Easter lunch or giving a child a ride, a fateful train journey or an unexpected homecoming.
And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake. It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations.
'Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch' MARIAN KEYES
'A perfect work of fiction' MEG MASON
'French Braid is Anne Tyler at her surgical, spare best' NIGELLA LAWSON
'Exquisitely crafted, tender, hilarious, devastatingly precise, I loved this powerful meditation on the small and often unvoiced moments that can make up a life' RACHEL JOYCE
'Such joyous immersion, I lost myself, and loved this superbly imperfect family' TESSA HADLEY
'A faultless novel, effortlessly profound. I read it in two sittings, totally immersed' VICTORIA HISLOP
'If Anne Tyler isn't the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR
** A 2022 Book to Look Forward To in The Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, i, Irish Times, Scotsman, Good Housekeeping **
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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
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Published: 24/03/2022
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ISBN: 9781784744625
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Length: 256 Pages
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Dimensions: 240mm x 26mm x 162mm
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Weight: 461g
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RRP: £16.99
Reviews
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Deftly done: witty, poignant, wry - and sort of radical . . . Tyler's genius lies in the subtlety with which she portrays her characters' internal worlds . . . another Tyler forte is the focus on things unsaid and the tensions that spread out from these, across generations and even into communities
Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times
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Another masterclass by our greatest chronicler of family life . . . There are many authors today who try to emulate Anne Tyler's technique, but none of them comes close to the lightness of touch, the accuracy of her ear, or the profundity of her vision
Craig Brown, Mail
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A novel about what is remembered, what we're left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time . . . For all its charm, "French Braid" is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging
Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Book Review
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Entrancing... nobody writes better about families than Anne Tyler... [she] has that rare ability to do much with what seems little, to bring the ordinary and usually unregarded lives of ordinary people to life and make them matter
Allan Massie, Scotsman
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French Braid is a novel full of compassion for the human condition by a writer confident enough not to pin everything down and to trust her story to work its quiet magic
Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times
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Subtle and powerful . . . a multi-layered and masterly exercise in sympathy and understanding
Lucy Dallas, Times Literary Supplement
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Tyler's prose is incisive and sharply observed without feeling effortful or overwrought, giving the impression that these are not characters of her making, but autonomous people whose lives she unobtrusively documents.
Pippa Bailey, New Statesman
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She is and always will be my favourite author
LIANE MORIARTY
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Anne Tyler really is the best . . . her sheer brilliance makes it all seem so effortless
GRAHAM NORTON
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One of my favourite writers
ALI SMITH
