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The
Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary and has ‘a fondness for method’. His series of guidebooks called Accidental Tourist for businessmen who also hate to travel, advises his readers on how to avoid human contact while traveling, where to find ‘American food’ abroad and how to convince themselves they haven’t left home. When Macon’s wife leaves him after the death of their son, he moves back home with two divorced brothers and spinster sister Rose, ‘safe among the people he'd started out with' and cuts himself off from the rest of the world. Almost against his will he becomes involved with an unconventional dog-trainer, Muriel, who helps him make the journey from lonely self-absorption to coping with his loss and taking control of his life. ‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world, is Anne Tyler, the American author of The Accidental Tourist and Saint Maybe… Brilliant, funny, sad and sensitive’ Nick Hornby ‘Anne
Tyler has [compassion] in spades. No life is too ordinary, no existence
too humdrum to be spared her penetrating gaze and gentle humour.’
‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good.' John Updike ’A
delight . . . a graceful comic novel about getting through life’
’Bittersweet
. . . Evocative . . . It’s easy to forget this is the warm
lull of fiction; you half-expect to run into her characters at the
dry cleaners . . . Tyler [is] a writer of great compassion.’
’Tyler
is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday. Home and homesickness
are her central preoccupations; repression, guilt and estrangement
her prevailing themes. Her characters are at once infuriating and
endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric. They are all unheroic
survivors.’ Lisa Allardice, By
the same author: |