French Braid
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Redhead by the Side of the Road
-
-
4.4 • 5 Ratings
-
-
- €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.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful walk to rough the stages of family life
Spun together with a connected thread, the year of a family growing up, apart and expanding. All separate yet connected through events large and small.
Quietly powerful, deeply emotional, truly saddened when I read the last page!
It’s a beautiful book.