Anne Tyler, página 3 de 8

When eighteen-year-old Ian Bedloe pricks the bubble of his familys optimistic self-deception, his brother Danny drives into a wall, his sister-in-law falls apart, and his parents age before his eyes. Consumed by guilt, Ian finds the hope of forgiveness at the Church of the Second Chance, and leaves college to cope with the three children he has inherited and his own embarrassing religion. Twenty years on, Ian''s prospects of a second chance are receding fast when, out of the heart of the domesticity that has engulfed him, strides a new figure who will bring him new life.

Liam Pennywell has spent most of his life dodging issues and skirting adventure when suddenly, in his sixty-first year, something happens that jolts him out of his certainty and leaves him with a fri

Macon Leary, el protagonista de esta novela, es un hombre que vive según un rígido y complejo sistema que, teóricamente, debe ponerle a salvo de cualquier eventualidad. Si su profesión es escribir guias para viajeros que no desean moverse de casa, su vida se atiene rigurosamente al plan establecido. Pero la muerte de su unico hijo -victima absurda de un atraco- y la subsiguiente ruptura de su matrimonio, dan al traste con todas sus precauciones y le arrojan a un entorno hostil y agresivo. El turista accidental, pone en pie un mundo que se parece estremecedoramente al que nos rodea al comun de los mortales.

One hot summer day Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore towards Pennsylvania, to the funeral of the husband of Maggie''s best friend. During the course of that journey, the author shows all there is t

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was eleven and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at twenty-one, the accident that would make her a widow at forty-one.At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country.The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman - and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog - will lead Willa into uncharted territory. Surrounded by new and surprising neighbours, she is plunged into the rituals that make a community, and takes pleasure in the most unexpected things.A bittersweet novel of hope and regret, fulfilment and renewal, Clock Dance brings us the everyday life of a woman who decides it's never too late to change direction, and choose your own path. 'She is and always will be my favourite author' Liane Moriarty

Friday August 15th, 1997. The night the girls arrived. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun, tenacious Bitsy (with her ''more organic than thou'' airs, who believes fervently that life can always be improved), two full sets of grandparents and a host of big-boned, confident relatives, taking delivery with characteristic American razzmatazz. Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba (her family ''only one generation removed from the bazaar'') and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant, elusive Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, the grandmother-to-be, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion. Every year, on the anniversary of ''Arrival Day'' their two extended families celebrate together, with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan, wholesome, stocky Jin-ho and, later, her new little sister Xiu-Mei, take roots, become American. While Maryam, the optimistic pessimist, confident that if things go wrong - as well they may - she will manage as she has before, contrarily preserves her ''outsider'' status, as if to prove that, despite her passport, she is only a guest in this bewildering country. Full of achingly hilarious moments and toe-curling misunderstandings, Digging to America is a novel with a deceptively small domestic canvas, and subtly large themes - it''s about belonging and otherness, about insiders and outsiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds. And the end catches you by the throat, ambushes your emotions when you least expect it, as only Tyler can.

Aunque las patas de gallo ya crezcan junto a sus hermosos ojos, aunque decenas de familiares -hijas, hijastras, nietos y tíos- aseguren que ya no queda tiempo para emprender un nuevo camino, Rebecca se resiste a convertirse para siempre en una persona que no es ella. Ya no le basta con reinventar la cocina tradicional en su salon de banquetes o cuidar de niños que nunca la llamaran abuela. Rebecca necesita adueñarse de su futuro. Y retoma los estudios que abandono el dia de su matrimonio, se apunta a un gimnasio, compra ropa interior de seda, se atreve a descolgar el telefono y a marcar un numero que creia olvidado. Anne Tyler, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer y legitima heredera de la gran tradicion de narradores sureños norteamericanos, nos habla en esta novela sobre el valor de los recuerdos y el inmenso coraje que se precisa para volver a escribir toda una vida.

Tyler (Breathing Lessons) encompasses the collision of cultures without losing her sharp focus on the daily dramas of modern family life in her 17th novel. When Bitsy and Brad Donaldson and Sami and Ziba Yazdan both adopt Korean infant girls, their chance encounter at the Baltimore airport the day their daughters arrive marks the start of a long, intense if sometimes awkward friendship. Sami''s mother, Maryam Yazdan, who carefully preserves her exotic outsiderness despite having emigrated from Iran almost 40 years earlier, is frequently perplexed by her son and daughter-in-law''s ongoing relationship with the loud, opinionated, unapologetically American Donaldsons. When Bitsy''s recently widowed father, Dave, endearingly falls in love with Maryam, she must come to terms with what it means to be part of a culture and a country. Stretching from the babies'' arrival in 1997 until 2004, the novel is punctuated by each year''s Arrival Party, a tradition manufactured and comically upheld by Bitsy; the annual festivities gradually reveal the families'' evolving connections. Though the novel''s perspective shifts among characters, Maryam is at the narrative and emotional heart of the touching, humorous story, as she reluctantly realizes that there may be a place in her heart for new friends, new loves and her new country after all. -- Publishers Weekly

Barnaby Gailtin has less in life than he once had. His ex-wife Natalie left him and their native Baltimore several years ago, taking their baby daughter Opal with her, and he has acquired an unalterably fixed position as the black sheep of the family in a family where black sheep arent tolerated.

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple- young, good- looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother''s grocery store in the Polish neighbourhood of Baltimore, he was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervour, they were hastily wed. But they never should have married. Pauline, impulsive and impractical, tumbles hit- or- miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, and judgemental, proceeds deliberately. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. A 17- year- old daughter disappears, and some years later this fractious pair is forced to rescue her little boy, named Pagan, from drug-infested San Francisco, to take him home and raise him. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more deeply into the complex entanglements of family life in this marvellous, multifaceted novel- one of Anne Tyler''s finest.