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
'If Anne Tyler isn't the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR
'She is and always will be my favourite author' LIANE MORIARTY
'My favourite author . . . She writes such absorbing, wise, tender books, devastatingly acute about human nature . . . She never fails' JACQUELINE WILSON
'Tyler's sentences are wholly hers, instantly recognisable and impossible to duplicate' HANYA YANIGIHARA
'Anne Tyler really is the best . . . her sheer brilliance makes it all seem so effortless' GRAHAM NORTON
'One of my favourite writers' ALI SMITH
Author
About Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s sixteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore. In 2012 Anne Tyler was the winner of the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.
