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French Braid

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Redhead by the Side of the Road

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French Braid

Written by: Anne Tyler
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author -- 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 determines 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, from giving a child a ride to a painstaking Easter lunch, a fateful train journey to 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.

'If Anne Tyler isn't the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR

© Anne Tyler 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

 Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction Sagas World Literature
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Critic Reviews

This is her 24th novel: I have read every one. . . you read her for the eccentric characters, the pitch-perfect dialogue, the humour and the tiny ordinary moments so exquisitely described they bring tears to your eyes (Liane Moriarty)
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)
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)
Any Tyler book is a gift. Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there's always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism (Anthony Cummins)
I'd put her in the same bracket as Ann Patchett or Elizabeth Strout. If you haven't discovered her work and love those two writers, you absolutely must get stuck in
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)
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)
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)
Subtle and powerful . . . a multi-layered and masterly exercise in sympathy and understanding (Lucy Dallas)
Such a perfect work of fiction, you want to turn it over like a tapestry to see how it is done; how Tyler can sew gentle humour into a truly heart-wrenching story, and twist all of life's hurts into a family saga that is ultimately life-affirming, and a brisk and thrilling read. We readers are so lucky a writer like Tyler exists (MEG MASON)
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