Read Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tylers funny and uplifting exploration of what it is to be an outsider. Morgan Gower has an outsize hairy beard, an array of peculiar costumes and fantastic headwear, and a serious smoking habit.
Kate Battista ha ventinove anni, vive a Baltimora e si sente in trappola. Tocca a lei occuparsi del padre scienziato, l'eccentrico e dispotico dottor Battista, tocca a lei badare alla sorella quindicenne con le sue manie da fanatica vegetariana. E anche al lavoro, salta sempre fuori qualche problema: i bambini della scuola materna la adorano, ma i genitori gradiscono un po' meno certi suoi metodi insoliti e sbrigativi. Altre sono le preoccupazioni del dottor Battista, che dopo anni di carriera accademica sente finalmente di avere per le mani una scoperta importante. Le sue ricerche sulle malattie autoimmuni sono a un punto di svolta, ma e necessario che Petr Scerbacev, il suo brillante e insostituibile assistente russo, non lo abbandoni proprio adesso; e invece purtroppo il visto di Petr sta per scadere. Un modo per farlo restare in America, pero, ci sarebbe, e allora, come sempre, il dottor Battista chiede soccorso a Kate, e sara un grido d'aiuto quasi commovente, per quanto assurdo. Da spirito indipendente e anticonformista qual e, la bisbetica Kate si lascera domare, a modo suo. C'e, in questa effervescente riscrittura della "Bisbetica domata", tutto lo humor raffinato che e il marchio di fabbrica di Anne Tyler. E noi lettori ci ritroviamo con il sapore pieno e agrodolce di una commedia cha fa splendere di leggerezza una figura femminile ribelle, devota, amabilissima.
Ben Joe is at college studying law when he gets a letter from his family saying one of his six sisters, Joanne, has returned home having left her husband, bringing her baby with her. Ben Joe goes home, and when he returns he remembers the past, the death of his father, his first girlfriend. He visits his father's girlfriend and then his own ex-girlfriend, Shelley. Shelley now has a boyfriend, John, but they see each other anyway, and in the interim, Joanne starts seeing John, until her husband turns up to take her home. Ben Joe asks Shelley to go back with him and marry him, so once everyone has got back to the way they were, he heads off to college again, with Shelley.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN''S FICTION PRIZEA RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICKIt was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summers day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Reds father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Reds grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home
Caleb Peck vanished in 1912, a voluntary refugee from an all-embracing Peckness of the Pecks. Sixty-one years later his half brother Daniel is still on trial, helped by his grand-daughter Justine, a character cursed with a Peckish necessity to see every side of a question. The moving search for the family's deepest roots, from the ragtime era at the end of the last century to small town America in the mid seventies is a haunting story about growing up and breaking away, rebellion and acceptance.
Another quiet masterpiece from the author of The Accidental Tourist - a funny, poignant and unsettling novel about marriage, families and the triumph of hope over experience. On a beach holiday, 40-year-old Cordelia Grinstead walks away from her family, and just keeps walking. She re-invents herself in a new town as a serious-minded woman without ties. But gradually the messy emotions of family life catch up with her once more.
