Publisher Description

A striking and joyous new look for the novels of one of the greatest storytellers of our timeDiscover a beautiful story about what it is to be human from Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling Anne TylerHow does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life?After the loss of his son and the departure of his wife, Macon neatly folds his anguish back into place and adapts the household on to more efficient lines. But with the arrival of Muriel, an eccentric and vulnerable dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, his attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Notes

New edition.

Author Biography

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grown-ups, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Clock Dance, Redhead by the Side of the Road and French Braid.In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; and in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Review

Her masterpiece * Daily Mail *
Brilliant, funny, sad and sensitive * Independent on Sunday *
Anne Tyler gets better with every book, and this one is a triumph – funny, profound, sad and ultimately reassuring * Sunday Telegraph *
Warmly entertaining and sharply organised against cuteness or mush * Guardian *
The Accidental Tourist is one of Anne Tyler's best books * New York Times *
A beautiful, incandescent, heartbreaking, exhilarating book… The Accidental Tourist cuts so close to the bone that it leaves one aching with pleasure and pain. Words fail me: one cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this * Washington Post *
Everything this author writes is shot through with intelligent insight, humour and humanity * Daily Mail *

Promotional

As Macon's life falls apart, he tries to tie it back together with routine and habit. But sometimes life just doesn't work like that.

Kirkus US Review

How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's - to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home" - who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with - two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose - in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review Text

Her masterpiece

Review Quote

Her masterpiece

Promotional "Headline"

From the Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestseller Anne Tyler. The Accidental Tourist is now re-jacketed along with the rest of Tyler's books in striking new backlist style

Details