Each chapter of the book deals with one of the characters and fills in the background until the climactic last family dinner at the restaurant. At first, I didn't care about any of the children in this book, and by the end, I mostly hated them.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant : Tyler, Anne : Free Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant : Tyler, Anne : Free

We understand that not everyone can donate right now, but if you can afford to contribute, we promise it will be put to good use. Interesting and likable characters (although you will have your favorites and those you root for) along with a storyline but isn't too predictable this is a great book for summer read, or even a book club due to its character study. I then picked up Tyler's The Accidental Tourist (arguably her most famous novel, since it was made into an Oscar-winning film), and was equally impressed, even though I thought the book felt a bit.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize. It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had NOT been empty. It is a story of a dysfunctional family viewed in separate chapters by different members of the family.

FUNNY, WIS, AND TRUE - The New York Times Web Archive FUNNY, WIS, AND TRUE - The New York Times Web Archive

Pearl Tull, the cloud-wearing sun around whom the other characters orbit -- as close as Mercury, as far away as Neptune, or somewhere between the two -- has a "favorite expression": "'I wouldn't know you if I saw you on the street'" (274). One night salesman Beck Tull walks out on his Baltimore family, leaving his wife Pearl to raise their three children alone. She deals with her common theme – family life – but it's done with a deftness, psychological depth and understanding of human behaviour that is artful, mature and beautifully done.Jenny helps to raise her stepchildren and finds that one—Slevin, the eldest—has trouble dealing with his parents’ divorce. The resentments among the siblings run deep and evolve over time, especially between manipulative Cody and the guileless Ezra, who was always his mother's favourite. Well, perhaps—because a life's anger seems to drain as Cody sees all his family "opening like a fan," drawing him in—and Beck, an old man who could not, long ago, take the "tangles" of family, will stay "until the dessert wine.