Anne Tyler Omnibus

No other writer captures like Anne Tyler, with acerbic affection and compassionate clarity, the shifts and defences of the average family struggling to keep life under control. This first omnibus edition of three full-length novels, all set in the respectable Baltimore streets she has made so particularly her own, encompasses the range of eccentricities and compromises to which they are driven.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantfollows the disintegration and eventual reaffirmation of the Tull family fierce, embittered Pearl, left by Beck to raise handsome, thrusting Cody, Jenny, the pediatrician losing herself in devotion to others, and docile Ezra, whose attempts to unite them all around a table at his eccentric Homesick Restaurant are the focus of their differences and their bond.

InThe Accidental Tourist, Macon a man of habit and routine, who writes guide books for businessmen who hate to leave home is confronted by chaos in his own family life. Between aching sadness and glorious absurdity, Macon hesitantly emerges from his sage cocoon into the vibrant, unpredictable world of the outrageous Muriel

AndBreathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize, lays bare the anatomy of a marriage. On the round trip to a friends funeral, Maggie and Ira Moran make detours literal and metaphorical into the lives of grown children, old friends, total strangers and their own past and, despite Iras disappointments and Maggies optimistic determination to rearrange life as she would like it to be, an old married couple fall in love all over again.

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels includeBreathing Lessons,The Accidental Tourist,Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,Ladder of Years,Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Threadand Vinegar Girl.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize forBreathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015A Spool of Blue Threadwas aSunday Timesbestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.