French Braid
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Redhead by the Side of the Road
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3.9 • 65 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
When Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice.
All she wants is space and silence. No clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.
But it turns out family life is impossible to escape - particularly when it's in your past. For Mercy it all begins in 1959, with a 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.
The glorious Sunday Times bestseller follows one family's joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and secrets, from the 1950s right up to today
'Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch' MARIAN KEYES
'A perfect work of fiction' MEG MASON
'She is and always will be my favourite author' LIANE MORIARTY
'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
'Anne Tyler really is the best... Her sheer brilliance makes it all seems so effortless' GRAHAM NORTON
'A faultless novel, effortlessly profound. I read it in two sittings, totally immersed' VICTORIA HISLOP
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Like her contemporaries Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler excels in exploring the microscopic details of everyday life—specifically around close relationships and family dynamics—to reveal their profound impact on us and our deepest desires. And in French Braid, the follow-up to 2020’s Booker-nominated Redhead by the Side of the Road, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author delivers another masterstroke. This short novel zones in on the Garretts, a Baltimore family whose ups and downs we follow from the 1950s—when they take their first and only holiday together—right up to the pandemic-rocked present day. The Garretts aren’t particularly remarkable, but that’s what makes Tyler’s writing so special. This is a family that could be your own, its dynamics recognisable to so many of us as they weather births, marriages, separations, loss and more. Warm, funny and always illuminating, French Braid is further proof that few write about family life better than Anne Tyler.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tyler (Redhead by the Side of the Road) returns with a dry and well-crafted look at a family that inexplicably comes apart over several decades. Serena Drew, a 20-something Baltimore grad student traveling with her boyfriend, James, thinks she recognizes her cousin, Nicholas Garrett, in the crowd at a Philadelphia train station in 2010, but she can't say for sure because she hasn't seen him for years. "You guys give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘once removed,' " James says, and wonders if "some deep dark secret" might explain why Serena rarely sees her aunt Alice or her uncle David, Nicholas's father. But the explanation, as it happens, is not so simple. This also turns out not to be Serena's story, as Tyler leaves the young couple for late 1950s Baltimore, where Alice; Serena's mother, Lily; and David are raised by their mismatched parents, a socially awkward plumber named Robin and begrudging housewife Mercy, who wants to be an artist. Once the parents become empty nesters, Mercy spends most of her days and nights in her neighboring studio. There are no big reveals, but Tyler's focus on character development proves fruitful; a reunion organized by the wistful Robin in the '90s is particularly affecting, as is a coda with David during the Covid-19 pandemic. As always, Tyler offers both comfort and surprise.
Customer Reviews
French Braid
I enjoyed this, but found it somewhat disjointed. The first chapter features the character of Serena and her boyfriend, James. However, we hear no more of Serena until right at the end of the novel, which then focuses on the childhood of her mother and the lives of her grandparents. The only thing we learn about Serena is that she is married- not to James - and is suffering from postnatal depression. Characters are sometimes well defined and explored, whereas some others are alluded to and then not explored at all.
The novel explores the theme of families and their peculiarities.
Just lovely, warm and cosy…
A perfect read about families, the kindness, the inbuilt love, the dysfunctionality and just the strength of genes… all about belonging even when we don’t want to. Loved it! Anne Tyler at her best!