Redhead by the Side of the Road

Bursting with vitality and variety, it's a tour de force . . . characters almost leap off the page with authenticity, speech and body language wonderfully caught * 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 *