Redhead by the Side of the Road: From the bestselling author of French Braid
Anne Tyler
*A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOKER PRIZE GEM*
A perfect love story for imperfect people.
Micah Mortimer measures out his days running errands for work, maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7:15, every morning). He is in a long-term relationship with his woman friend Cassia, but they live apart. His carefully calibrated life is regular, steady, balanced.
But then the order of things starts to tilt. Cassia is threatened with eviction, and when a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son, he is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle.
Can Micah, a man to whom those around him always seem just out of reach, find a way back to his perfectly imperfect love story?
**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020**
'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
Product Details
About Anne Tyler
Reviews for Redhead by the Side of the Road: From the bestselling author of French Braid
Sunday Times
Tyler’s piercing omniscience is on full, enthralling display
Vanity Fair
A book this lovely feels practically heaven-sent…. Crisp and direct, yet full of subtle touches, it’s a big-hearted tale of roads not taken — a delight from start to finish
Daily Mail
Anne Tyler really is the best. This reads as if she wrote it in one flawless seamless sitting. The sheer brilliance of making it all seem so effortless
Graham Norton Almost unbearably poignant . . . a moving and perceptive story about one man’s inability to connect with others and his gradual move towards greater self-fulfilment
Sunday Express
Anne Tyler has the ability to take the minutiae of characters’ lives and say wise things about the human condition that other writers can only dream of
Stylist
Tyler has every gift a great novelist needs: intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising. She has unembarrassed goodness as well. In this time of snark, preening, sub-tweeting and the showy torment of characters, we could use more Tyler
Amy Bloom
New York Times
As always, Tyler is a magician, able to conjure up, in a handful of sentences, such endlessly complicated things as the comical messiness of family life . . . You finish her novels feeling closer to life, and closer to other people
Craig Brown
Mail on Sunday
Tyler rarely disappoints, but this is her best novel in some time – slender, unassuming, almost cautious in places, yet so very finely and energetically tuned, so apparently relaxed, almost flippantly so, but actually supremely sophisticated . . . Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here . . . In Micah, she’s created a man to puzzle and worry about, to ache and to root for
Julie Myerson
Observer
Tyler is a writer who compels not through the complexities of plot but by the precision of her observations, her perfect pitch in the music of unremarkable lives
Clare Clark
Guardian