Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
A Novel
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3.6 • 352 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a “funny, heart-hammering, wise” (The New York Times) portrait of a family that will remind you why "to read a novel by Anne Tyler is to fall in love" (PEOPLE).
Abandoned by her wanderlusting husband, stoic Pearl raised her three children on her own. Now grown, the siblings are inextricably linked by their memories—some painful—which hold them together despite their differences.
Hardened by life’s disappointments, wealthy, charismatic Cody has turned cruel and envious. Thrice-married Jenny is errant and passionate. And Ezra, the flawed saint of the family, who stayed at home to look after his mother, runs a restaurant where he cooks what other people are homesick for, stubbornly yearning for the perfect family he never had.
Now gathered during a time of loss, they will reluctantly unlock the shared secrets of their past and discover if what binds them together is stronger than what tears them apart.
“[In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Tyler] has arrived at a new level of power.” —John Updike, The New Yorker
“Marvelous, astringent, hilarious, [and] strewn with the banana peels of love.” —Cosmopolitan
Customer Reviews
the complexity of families
Anne Tyler’s characters come to you, not as a frontal attack but, from the side. You don’t know what to expect from them and their motives are sometimes obtuse. You don’t get to know them as much from the storytelling as from the inside out, until you realize you are learning about the multi-layers of family relationships and what draws them together as well as keeps them apart.
Bookreader of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
A good read. It's a wonder that Ezra and Cody did not end up bitter enemies. Jenny was a disappointment as I thought her character would be more assertive because of her ambition to go into medicine. How could a controlling and hateful Mother go from a monster to her children and then in later years do a complete turn around was a little puzzling. All in all a good scenario of what life is like when a Father leaves his family and responsibilities to a unbalanced woman!
One of my favorite books of all time
Anne Tyler’s characters are such touchingly imperfect human beings and their very ordinary lives are so affecting that they become absolutely real to the reader. You feel that you are listening in on their conversations and not just reading dialogues in a novel.
I first read this book more than 30 years ago and it led me to go on an Anne Tyler binge; all her novels were at the least excellent, and all had characters that were so utterly believable and ordinary and deeply affecting.
After all this time, I happened to see this title on a list of e-books and decided to re-read it. And it was just as wonderful the second time.