accidental tourist anne tyler

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The Accidental Tourist Paperback – 4 May 1995

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Discover a beautiful story about what it is to be human from Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling Anne Tyler How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life? After the loss of his son and the departure of his wife, Macon neatly folds his anguish back into place and adapts the household on to more efficient lines. But with the arrival of Muriel, an eccentric and vulnerable dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, his attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone. **ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date 4 May 1995
• Dimensions 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm
• ISBN-10 9780099480013
• ISBN-13 978-0099480013
• See all details

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Product description

About the author.

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons , The Accidental Tourist , Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , Ladder of Years , Back When We Were Grown-ups , Digging to America , A Spool of Blue Thread, Clock Dance, Redhead by the Side of the Road and French Braid. In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; and in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0099480018
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st Vintage Book Edition (4 May 1995)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780099480013
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099480013
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm
• 296 in Cat, Dog & Animal Humour
• 971 in Love, Sex & Marriage Humour
• 4,921 in Humorous Fiction

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

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.

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The Latest Books from Anne Tyler

French Braid

“A moving meditation on the passage of time...a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging.” —Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Book Review

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.

Redhead by the Side of the Road

But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler's signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation.

Teenage Wasteland

A vintage short.

First appearing in the pages of  Seventeen Magazine , “Teenage Wasteland” has become one of Anne Tyler’s most widely beloved short stories—an affecting and masterful portrait of a life interrupted and a family come undone. 

Daisy Coble had been a good mother, and so she was ashamed to find out from Donny’s teacher that he had been misbehaving. He was noisy, lazy, disruptive, and he was caught smoking. At night, she lay awake wondering where she had gone wrong, and how she could have failed as a parent. Unsure of herself, Daisy follows the advice of professionals, and hires Donny a tutor with some unusual ideas to set the boy straight. But, has the gap between them grown too wide to bridge?

Also Available from Anne Tyler

Clock Dance

Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles

Vinegar Girl

A Spool of Blue Thread

The Beginner’s Goodbye

Noah’s Compass

Digging to America

Breathing Lessons

The Amateur Marriage

A Slipping-Down Life

Back When We Were Grownups

The Accidental Tourist

A Patchwork Planet

Celestial Navigation

The Clock Winder

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Earthly Possessions

If Morning Ever Comes

Morgan’s Passing

Saint Maybe

Searching for Caleb

The Tin Can Tree

’The Accidental Tourist’

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Reviewed by Larry McMurty

• Sept. 8, 1985

IN Anne Tyler's fiction, family is destiny, and (nowadays, at least) destiny clamps down on one in Baltimore. For an archeologist of manners with Miss Tyler's skills, the city is a veritable Troy, and she has been patiently excavating since the early 1970's, when she skipped off the lawn of Southern fiction and first sank her spade in the soil which has nourished such varied talents as Poe, Mencken, Billie Holiday and John Waters, the director of the films ''Pink Flamingos'' and ''Polyester.''

It is without question some of the fustiest soil in America; in the more settled classes, social styles developed in the 19th century withstand, with sporelike tenacity, all that the present century can throw at them. Indeed, in Baltimore all classes appear to be settled, if not cemented, in grooves of neighborhood and habit so deep as to render them impervious - as a bright child puts it in ''The Accidental Tourist'' - to everything except nuclear flash.

From this rich dust of custom, Miss Tyler is steadily raising a body of fiction of major dimensions. One of the persistent concerns of this work is the ambiguity of family happiness and unhappiness. Since coming to Baltimore, Miss Tyler has probed this ambiguity in seven novels of increasing depth and power, working numerous changes on a consistent set of themes.

In ''The Accidental Tourist'' these themes, some of which she has been sifting for more than 20 years, cohere with high definition in the muted (or, as his wife says, ''muffled'') personality of Macon Leary, a Baltimore man in his early 40's who writes travel guides for businessmen who, like himself, hate to travel.

The logo on the cover of these travel guides (''The Acciental Tourist in England,'' ''The Accidental Tourist in New York,'' etc.) is a winged armchair; their assumption is that all travel is involntary, and they attempt to spare these involuntary travelers the shock of the unfamiliar, insofar as that's possible. Macon will tell you where to find Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm, or whether there's a restaurant that serves Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli in Rome. Macon himself is so devoted to his part of Baltimore that even the unfamiliar neighborhoods he visits affect him as negatively as foreign countries.

Like most of Miss Tyler's males, Macon Leary presents a broad target to all of the women (and even a few of the men) with whom he is involved. His mother; his sister, Rose; his wife, Sarah, and, in due course, his girlfriend, Muriel Pritchett - a dog trainer of singular appearance and ability - regularly pepper him on the subject of his shortcomings, the greatest of which is a lack of passion, playfulness, spontaneity or the desire to do one single thing that they like too do. This lack is the more maddening because Macon is reasonably competent; if prompted he will do more or less anything that's required of him. What exasperates the women is the necessity for constant prompting.

WHEN attacked, Macon rarely defends himself with much vigor, which only heightens the exasperation. He likes a quiet life, based on method and system. His systems are intricate routines of his own devising, aimed at reducing the likelihood that anything unfamiliar will occur. The unfamiliar is never welcome in Macon's life, and he believes that if left to himself he can block it out or at least neutralize it.

Not long after we meet him, Macon is left to himself. Sarah, his wife of 20 years, leaves him. Macon and Sarah have had a tragedy: their 12-year-old son, Ethan, was murdered in a fast-food joint, his death an accidental byproduct of a holdup.

Though Macon is as grieved by this loss as Sarah, he is, as she points out, ''not a comfort.'' When she remarks that since Ethan's death she sometimes wonders if there's any point to life, Macon replies, honestly but unhelpfully, that it never seemed to him there was all that much point to begin with. As if this were not enough, he can never stop himself from correcting improper word choice, even if the incorrect usage occurs in a conversation about the death of a child. These corrections are not made unkindly, but they are invariably made; one does not blame Sarah for taking off.

With the ballast of his marriage removed, Macon immediately tips into serious eccentricity. His little systems multiply, and his remaining companions, a Welsh corgi named Edward and a cat named Helen, fail to adapt to them. Eventually the systems overwhelm Macon himself, causing him to break a leg. Not long after, he finds himself where almost all of Miss Tyler's characters end up sooner or later - back in the grandparental seat. There he is tended to by his sister. His brothers, Porter and Charles, both divorced, are also there, repeating, like Macon, a motion that seems all but inevitable in Anne Tyler's fiction -a return to the sibling unit.

This motion, or tendency, cannot be blamed on Baltimore. In the very first chapter of Miss Tyler's first novel, ''If Morning Ever Comes'' (1964), a young man named Ben Joe Hawkes leaves Columbia University and hurries home to North Carolina mainly because he can't stand not to know what his sisters are up to. From then on, in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had planted tiny magnets in them which can be activated once they have seen what the extrafmilial world is like. The lovers and mates in her books, by exerting their utmost strength, can sometimes delay these regroupings for as long as 20 years, but sooner or later a need to be with people who are really familiar - their brothers and sisters - overwhelms them.

Macon's employer, a man named Julian, who manages to marry but not to hold Macon's sister, puts it succinctly once Rose has drifted back to her brothers: ''She'd worn herself a groove or something in that house of hers, and she couldn't help swerving back into it.'' Almost no one in Miss Tyler's books avoids that swerve; the best they can hope for is to make a second escape, as does the resourceful Caleb Peck in ''Searching For Caleb'' (1976). Brought back after an escape lasting 60 years, Caleb sneaks away again in his 90's.

Macon, less adventurous than Celab Peck, is saved from this immolation-by-siblings through the unlikely agency of Edward, the Welsh corgi. Unnerved byy the dissolution of his own secure routine, Edward begins to crack up. He starts attacking people, including Julian and Macon's brothers too, one of whom, in a brilliant scene, Edward trees in the family pantry at the very moment that Macon is experiencing an anxiety attack in a restaurant on top of a building in New York.

Re-enter Muriel Pritchett, the dog trainer Macon had met earlier when forced to work out emergency boarding arrangements for Edward. Muriel is everything the Learys are not: talkative, confrontational, an eccentric dresser, casual about word choice. She lives with her sickly child, Alexander, in a Baltimore neighborhood that is not much less foreign to Macon than, say, Quebec. Muriel is also very different from Sarah.

Nonetheless, to the horror of his family, Macon moves in with Muriel. His indifference to his former life is os great that he doesn't even get upset when the pipes in his own house burst, ruining his living room. Muriel, despite her apparent unsuitability, ''could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random, insignificant oments would flash before him: Muriel at her kitchen table, ankles twined around her chair rungs, filling out a contest form for an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood. Muriel telling her mirror, 'I look like the wrath of God' - a kind of ritual of leavetaking. Muriel doing the dishes in her big pink rubber gloves with the crimson fingernails, raising a soapy plate and trailing it airily over to the rinse water.''

Macon, a fairly keen self-analyst, recognizes that while he does not exactly love Muriel, he ''loved the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her. In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person.''

Surprise, however, is not quite enough; not to ne so wedded to the familiar as Macon. Sarah, the not-yet-divorced wife, though a singularly articulate critic of Learys in general and Macon in particular, finds that all her criticisms do not entirely invalidate Macon as a mate. She wants him back, Muriel wants to keep him, and a fierce tussle ensues, one in which Macon takes a largely spectatorial interest. He cannot entirely resist the suitable Sarah, nor forget the unsuitable but vivid Muriel.

The final scenes of this drama take place in Paris, where the two women manage to corner him. Even as Macon is aking his decision, he is reassured by a sense that in a way it is only temporary, life being, in his scheme of things, a stage from which none of the major players ever completely disappear.

''The Accidental Tourist'' is one of Anne Tyler's best books, as good as 'Morgan's Passing,'' ''Searching for Caleb,'' ''Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.'' The various domestic worlds we enter - Macon/Sarah; Macon/ the Leary siblings; Macon/Muriel - are delineated with easy skill; now they are poignant, now funny. Miss Tyler shows, with a fine clarity, the mingling of misery and contentment int eh daily lives of her families, remind us how alike - and yet distinct - happy and unhappy families can be. Muriel Pritchett is as appealing a woman as Miss Tyler has created; and upon the quiet Macon she lavishes the kind of intelligent consideration that he only intermittently gets from his own womenfolk.

TWO aspects of the novel do not entirely satisfy. One is the unaccountable neglect of Edward, the corgi, in the last third of the book. Edward is one of the more fully characterized dogs in recent literature; his breakdown is at least as interesting and if anything more delicately handled than Macon's. Yet Edward is allowed to slide out of the picture. Millions of readers who have managed to saddle themselves with neurotic quadrupeds will want to know about Edward's situation.

The other questionable element is the dead son, Ethan. Despite an effort now and then to bring him into the book in a vignette or a nightmare, Ethan remains mostly a premise, and one not advanced very confidently by the author. She is brilliant at showing how the living press upon one another, but less convincing when she attempts to add the weight of the dead. The reader is invited to feel that it is this tragedy that separates Macon and Sarah. But a little more familiarity with Macon and Sarah, as well as with the marriages in Miss Tyler's other books, leaves one wondering. Macon's methodical approach to life might have driven Sarah off anyway. He would have corrected her word choice once too often, one feels. Miss Tyler is more successful at showing through textures how domestic life is sustained than she is at showing how these textures are ruptured by a death.

At the level metaphor, however, whe has never been stronger. The concept of an accidental tourist captures in a phrase something she has been saying all along, if not about life, at least about men: they are frequently accidental tourists in their own lives. Macon Leary sums up a long line o fher males, Jake Simmes in ''Earthly Possessions'' is an accidental kidnapper. The lovable Morgan Gower of ''Morgan's Passing,'' an accidental obstetrician in the first scenes, is an accidental husband or lover in the rest of the book. Her men slump arond like tired tourists - friendly, likable, but not all that engaged. Their characters, like their professions, seem accidental even though they come equipped with genealogies of Balzacian thoroughness. All of them have to be propelled through life by (at the very least) a brace of sharp, purposeful women - it usually takes not only a wife and a girlfriend but an indignant mother and one or more devoted sisters to keep these sluggish fellows moving. They poke around haphazardly, ever mild and perennially puzzled, in the foreign country called Life. If they see anything worth seeing, it is usually because a determined woman on the order of Muriel Pritchett thrusts it under their noses and demands that they pay some attention. The fates of these families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females. In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction.

Larry McMurty's most recent novel is ''Lonesome Dove.''

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THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST

by Anne Tyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 1985

How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's—to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home"—who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with—two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose—in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1985

ISBN: 0345452003

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985

LITERARY FICTION

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More by Anne Tyler

BOOK REVIEW

by Anne Tyler

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

More by Donna Tartt

by Donna Tartt

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The Accidental Tourist

56 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Summary and Study Guide

Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist is a literary fiction novel that follows the character-driven story of Macon Leary, who must navigate life following the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage. The Accidental Tourist was originally published in 1985 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Accidental Tourist is Anne Tyler’s 10th novel and one of her most recognized works. This study guide follows the paperback Berkley edition released in 1986.

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Macon Leary is a writer based out of Baltimore who creates travel guides for people who must travel on business but do not want to be bothered with discomfort or unexpected experiences. Macon is an expert at finding the most comfortable and convenient solutions to average problems. While driving back from a beach vacation, Macon’s wife, Sarah , informs him that she wants a divorce. It’s been a year since their son, Ethan, was unexpectedly killed, and the two have grieved in very different ways. After Sarah moves out, Macon restructures their house, creating a multitude of systems and contraptions to maximize comfort and convenience. When it comes time for Macon to go on his next trip for work, he goes to board the family dog, Edward . He learns Edward is blacklisted from the vet for biting a worker last time he was boarded. Desperate, Macon finds another vet, where he meets Muriel Pritchett. Muriel is talkative and great with dogs. She agrees to let Macon board Edward and proposes that she give Edward obedience lessons. Macon declines and goes on his trip. When he returns, he commits to more systems to run the house. As these systems break down, Macon has an accident, resulting in a broken leg.

Macon moves in with his siblings, Rose , Charles, and Porter, while his leg heals. The Leary siblings are as peculiar as Macon with their habits, rituals, and organizational tendencies. They don’t answer the phone, eat baked potatoes often, and play the same made-up card game they’ve played since they were children. Macon’s siblings complain about Edward’s behavior, but Macon struggles to do anything about it because Edward belonged to Ethan. Finally, after being bit on the hand, Macon reaches out to Muriel, who has persistently tried to get Macon to hire her ever since they met. Muriel is great with Edward and helps Macon teach Edward things like sitting, staying, and walking on a leash. Edward struggles to learn to lie down, so Macon calls the vet. The clerk informs Macon that Muriel is out that day because her son is sick. The next time Macon sees Muriel, he asks how her son is, and she loses her temper because he wasn’t supposed to know about her son yet. Macon fires Muriel in the same scene because she harshly punishes Edward. As Macon’s leg heals, he struggles to overcome his grief from Ethan’s death and his separation from Sarah. When Sarah invites Macon to dinner, he proposes they have another baby to resolve their marital issues, but Sarah instead tells Macon she wants a divorce and cites his seemingly callous reaction after Ethan’s death and lack of comfort to her as her reason.

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After Macon gets his cast off, he flies to New York for work. He visits a skyscraper restaurant, where he has a panic attack after realizing he’s distanced himself from everyone he’s ever cared about. He calls home to ask for help despite his siblings being states away and learns that Edward is misbehaving and has cornered Charles in the pantry. Macon has no one else to call to help Charles and take Edward, so he calls Muriel and asks for her help. Not only does Muriel agree to rescue Charles, but she also comforts Macon and talks him down from his panic. When Macon returns from New York, he allows Muriel to begin training Edward again, and the two begin to spend a lot more time together. Muriel tells Macon all about her life and her son, Alexander. She invites Macon to come to dinner at her house, but Macon is afraid to do so, thinking it will feel like he’s finding substitutes for Sarah and Ethan.

When Macon goes to deliver a letter to Muriel to explain why he won’t have dinner with her, she surprises him with her tenderness, and Macon opens up about his grief regarding Ethan and the way he’s distanced himself from everyone. Muriel invites Macon to sleep in her bed, and he allows her to lead him to her room and tuck him in. Macon begins to spend much more time with Muriel and Alexander, eating dinner with them, helping Alexander with his homework, and joining them at Muriel’s parents’ house for Christmas. Macon’s relationship with Muriel heals him and helps him become less distant from the people around him. He moves in with her and gets to know the people of her street better than he ever knew his own neighbors. He forms a special bond with Alexander, teaching him to fix household items and taking him shopping for clothes.

Eventually, Muriel’s tendencies begin to wear Macon down. He is bothered by her misuse of words, her persistence, her insecurities, and her chaos. Muriel tries to convince Macon to take her to France, but Macon tells her no. Muriel presents Macon a calendar for the current year to show him she’s picked out a wedding day for them. Macon tells her he’s not interested in marrying again because he thinks only perfect couples get married, which leads to an argument and more tension between the couple as time passes.

After encountering Sarah at a wedding, Macon finds Sarah reaching out to him more and more during a trip to Canada. Sarah calls him in every city, at first asking if she can move back into their house because her lease is ending, then just wanting to talk about the weather. She hints that she wants to get back together with Macon and tells him she wishes she were with him in Canada. When Macon lands back in Baltimore, he drives home to Sarah instead of driving to Muriel’s house. They rekindle their relationship, much to Muriel’s heartbreak. Macon and Sarah begin to put their lives back together, buying new furniture and reassembling the house after it was damaged in a snowstorm during Macon’s absence. When Sarah is not around, Macon finds himself longing to talk to someone. He calls Muriel to ask about Alexander’s allergy shots, and Muriel scolds him for having the audacity to contact her about Alexander after abandoning them.

When Macon leaves for France, Muriel shows up on his same flight, having booked the same hotel. Muriel insists that Macon needs her, and Macon feels Muriel will be extremely unprepared to travel in Paris. Macon does his best to avoid Muriel, and she gets along fine without him. He eventually agrees to have dinner with her at a Burger King in Paris, where Muriel fills Macon in about the people on her street. She asks him to come to bed with her, but Macon declines. After several days in Paris, Macon starts day trips to other cities. When he goes to invite Muriel to join him, he throws his back out and becomes incapacitated. He calls his publisher to inform him of the delay, and word gets back to Sarah, who shows up in Paris to take care of Macon. She informs Macon that she saw Muriel, and he tells her that she followed him to France on her own accord. Sarah becomes excited about having a second honeymoon with Macon while they’re in France. One night, she asks Macon why he didn’t do anything to stop Muriel from getting on the plane with him. Macon doesn’t have an answer and realizes he’s never made any major life decisions on his own. Everything that has happened to him has resulted from passively accepting things. He stays up all night thinking and eventually decides to return to Muriel, realizing she is better for him.

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Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love

The Accidental Tourist

By: Anne Tyler

• Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
• Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
• 4.3 out of 5 stars 4.3 (172 ratings)

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Saint Maybe

• Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
• Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 72
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 59
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 59

Ian Bedloe is the ideal teenage son, leading a cheery, apple-pie life with his family in Baltimore. That is, until a careless and vicious rumor leads to a devastating tragedy. Imploding from guilt, Ian believes he is the one responsible for the tragedy. No longer a star athlete with a bright future, and desperately searching for salvation, he stumbles across a storefront with a neon sign that simply reads: Church of the Second Chance. Ian has always viewed his penance as a burden. But through the power of faith and the love of family, he begins to view it as a gift.

• 5 out of 5 stars
• By MNtea on 02-26-22

Ladder of Years

• Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
• Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 147
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 132
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"Baltimore Woman Disappears During Family Vacation." The headlines are all the same: Beloved mother and wife Delia Grinstead was last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing only a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with $500 tucked inside. To the best of her family's knowledge, she has disappeared without a trace. But Delia didn't disappear. She ran.

Terrific book, outstanding narration.

• By windymoon on 08-28-21

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

• Narrated by: Elizabeth Rodgers
• Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 200
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 170
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Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family that could never be his own. Now Pearl and her three grown children have gathered....

Classic Anne Tyler

• By Eve Harris on 09-14-21

A Patchwork Planet

• Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
• Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 46
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 43
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 41

Barnaby Gaitlin was never a bad kid, but he was certainly doing his best to impersonate one. As a teenager, he developed a habit of breaking into other people’s houses. But he wasn’t interested in the valuable loot - he just liked to read people’s mail, peruse their family albums, and maybe pocket a few personal mementos. Now almost 30 and divorced, he finds himself working for Rent-aBack, which helps the elderly and infirm move furniture or take down their Christmas trees. It’s the perfect career for Barnaby.

• By Susan on 06-06-21

Earthly Possessions

• Narrated by: Kate Handford
• Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 25
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 23
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 23

Charlotte Emory has always lived a quiet, conventional life in Clarion, Maryland. She lives as simply as possible and one day decides to simplify everything and leave her husband. Her last trip to the bank throws Charlotte's life into an entirely different direction when a restless young man in a nylon jacket takes her hostage during the robbery - and soon the two are heading south into an unknown future and a most unexpected fate.

The Amateur Marriage

• Narrated by: Blair Brown
• Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 226
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 121
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They seemed like the perfect couple: young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Awesome Anne Tyler

• By Pamela Harvey on 01-25-04

Searching for Caleb

• Narrated by: Amy Finegan
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• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 23
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle-class - Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes - they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that's why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother, Daniel, is still wondering.

• 4 out of 5 stars

Interesting Story!

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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 11
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 9
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 9

Morgan Gower is bored of the tedium of his ordinary life: of his job as manager of a run-down hardware store; of his wife; of his "industriously dull" daughters; of his mother; of his sister. But Morgan's secret escape lies in a box filled with costumes, filled with everything from a fake beard to Napoleon's tricorne to Daniel Boone, all of which provide an outlet away from his life and into the identity of someone who is assuredly not Morgan Gower.

• 1 out of 5 stars

Nothing good to say

• By RH on 05-06-24

Redhead by the Side of the Road

• Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 1,012
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 820
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 824

Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day, his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late 30s a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

• 2 out of 5 stars

Disappointed Diehard Tyler Fan

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The Lincoln Highway

• A Read with Jenna Pick (A Novel)

By: Amor Towles

• Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland, Dion Graham
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• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 22,399
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 19,783
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 19,659

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.

I'm totally opposite

• By Meaghan Bynum on 10-10-21

Olive Kitteridge

By: Elizabeth Strout

• Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
• Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 2,925
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,526
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At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

Depressing! Watse of a credit!

• By Amazon Customer on 10-28-19

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By: Delia Owens

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• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 295,020
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 260,874
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For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand.

Don't listen to the negative reviews.

• By Kyle on 12-03-19

By: Fredrik Backman

• Narrated by: Marin Ireland
• Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 17,712
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 15,931
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 15,889

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semifinals, and they actually have a shot at winning.

• By Dee Garza on 06-12-17

The Boys from Biloxi

• A Legal Thriller

By: John Grisham

• Narrated by: Michael Beck
• Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,497
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 10,432
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 10,372

For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, and drugs to contract killings. The vice was controlled by small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumored to be members of the Dixie Mafia. Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up in Biloxi in the sixties and were childhood friends, as well as Little League all-stars.

• 3 out of 5 stars

Long and boring

• By ATM on 10-20-22

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By: Gabrielle Zevin

• Narrated by: Jennifer Kim, Julian Cihi
• Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 13,360
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,707
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,698

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom.

This book sucked the life out of me

• By RMan on 08-08-22

The Dutch House

By: Ann Patchett

• Narrated by: Tom Hanks
• Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 55,363
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 49,459
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 49,125

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother.

Not my favorite Patchett

• By Regina on 12-07-19

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

By: Taylor Jenkins Reid

• Narrated by: Alma Cuervo, Julia Whelan, Robin Miles
• Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 86,175
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 76,023
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 75,751

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated.

Glucose Gluttony

• By W Perry Hall on 03-17-18

Apples Never Fall

By: Liane Moriarty

• Narrated by: Caroline Lee
• Length: 18 hrs and 3 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 22,509
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 19,572
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 19,503

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after 50 years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

I wanted to love this BUT.....

• By Mary on 09-27-21

Publisher's summary

In this irresistible novel, Anne Tyler explores the slippery alchemy of attracting opposites, and the struggle to rebuild one’s life after unspeakable tragedy.

Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Despite Macon’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel upends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined.

A fresh and timeless tale of unexpected bliss, The Accidental Tourist showcases Tyler’s talents for making characters - and their relationships - feel both real and magical.

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Literature & Fiction

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The Story of Arthur Truluv

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• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,336
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• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,160

Three people find their way back from loss and loneliness to a different kind of belonging in this deeply moving novel. Arthur, an old widower struggling to overcome his grief, meets Maddy, a troubled teenage girl who avoids school by hiding out where Arthur goes every day for lunch. The two strike up a friendship that draws them out of isolation.

Sickly Sweet

• By Amazon Customer on 01-19-18

The Time Traveler's Wife

By: Audrey Niffenegger

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• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 13,552
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 10,023
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Clare and Henry have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was 36. They were married when Clare was 23 and Henry was 31. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

One of my favorite books

• By Joey on 01-13-08

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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 91
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 82
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 81

From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organize her own death.

A Feminist Romp

• By annkpowers on 07-02-22

The Folded Leaf

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• Narrated by: Mark Boyett
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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 69
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Here is a classic novel from one of our most honored writers - the author of such acclaimed works as So Long, See You Tomorrow and All the Days and Nights . The Folded Leaf is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s, when childhood lasted longer than it does today and even adults were more innocent of what life could bring.

Midwestern Misfits

• By David on 03-17-15

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• Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 99
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 88
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In the middle of her life, Nan decides to leave her husband at home and begin an impromptu trek across the country, carrying with her a turquoise leather journal she intends to fill. The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. In her journal, Nan addresses the thorniness - and the allure - of marriage, the sweet ties to children, and the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters.

For women over 50

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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 94
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Sharon has lived calmly in Chinook Springs, Washington, her entire life. All that changes when her best friend of twenty years, Penny, takes an impulsive trip to seek out her only living relatives in Finland, and brings Sharon with her.

Fun plot and fun characters

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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 180
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New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows.

not a whole lot of spycraft just a good story

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• By J. E. Jordan on 05-23-23

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In 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only 18, Annie travels alone halfway across the country to the Midwestern university where Carl is studying law - and there they marry. But Carl and Annie’s first year together is much more difficult than they anticipated as they find themselves in a faraway place with little money and few friends. With hardship and poverty weighing heavily upon them, they come to realize that their greatest sources of strength, loyalty, and love will help them make it through.

Another Wonderful Betty Smith Audio Book

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When Annie Jacobson's brother Mike enlists as a medic in the Army in 1967, he hands her a piece of paper with the address of their long-estranged father. If anything should happen to him in Vietnam, Mike says, Annie must let their father know. In Mike's absence, their father returns to face tragedy at home, adding an extra measure of complication to an already tense time. As they work toward healing and pray fervently for Mike's safety overseas, letter by letter the Jacobsons must find a way to pull together as a family, regardless of past hurts.

Real fiction

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• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 70
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 55
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By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story. Where I'm Calling From , his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral , What We Talk About When We Talk About Love , and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.

Love Carver, But Dietz Ruins It With Reading

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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 24
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 22
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 22

Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn - especially when he's falling in love.

Marginalized characters

• By Linda on 05-05-24

A Spool of Blue Thread

• Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 2,608
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 2,271
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 2,279

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.

The Sharp Edge Of Family

• By Sara on 03-10-15

The Clock Winder

• Narrated by: Suzanne Pirret
• Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 17
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 15
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 15

Mrs. Emerson, widowed with seven adult children, lives alone in crumbling Victorian mansion outside Baltimore with only a collection of antique clocks to keep her company. Elizabeth Abbott - 23 years old, aimless, bohemian, and beautiful - leads a vagabond lifestyle until she happens upon Mrs. Emerson's home and convinces the older woman to hire her as a handyman. When three of the strange, idiosyncratic Emerson children return to their childhood home for a visit, they are irresistibly drawn to Elizabeth.

• By Sharlotte on 12-21-23

If Morning Ever Comes

• Narrated by: Debora Weston
• Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 16
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 14
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 14

In the debut novel that set her on the path to becoming an American classic, Anne Tyler's If Morning Ever Comes presents a timeless portrait of a young man's homecoming and his ensuing journey through youth, identity, family, and love. Raised among a family of strong-minded women has left Ben Joe Hawkes as something of a worrier, who has always felt like an outsider in his own family.

Her Worst on Audible

• By Sharlotte on 12-10-23

French Braid

• Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 888
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 777
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 771

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common.

Definitely not my favorite

• By 80 Oaks on 03-31-22

The Tin Can Tree

• Narrated by: Tara Ward
• Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 14
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 11
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 10

In the small town of Larksville, the Pike family is hopelessly out of step with the daily rhythms of life. Mrs. Pike seldom speaks, while Mr. Pike maintains a forced stoicism. Only their 10-year-old, Simon, seems able to acknowledge that their world has changed. He just doesn't understand why. The Pikes may choose to stand still, to hide from an unnamable past, but the strange shroud over their home cannot be contained.

The characterization

• By Linda on 01-28-24

Back When We Were Grownups

• Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 257
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 103
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 105

Back When We Were Grownups is about one woman's search for who she really is. Listen as a 53-year-old grandmother tries to recover her girlhood self and that dignified grownup she had once been.

Wonderful characters

• By Barbara on 08-19-03

Clock Dance

• Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 1,033
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 925
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 919

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother but isn't sure she ever will be. Then, one day, Willa receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore....

disappointed

• By Amazon Customer on 07-13-18

A Slipping-Down Life

• Narrated by: Deborah McBride
• Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 14
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 11

Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager with a distant father and hours and hours of silence to fill. Then one night she hears local rock singer Drumstrings Casey on the radio - and becomes instantly attracted to his cool, motionless voice. Evie learns that Drumstrings frequently plays at a dingy roadhouse called The Unicorn. So she goes there and, with an uncharacteristically bold gesture, bursts out of her lonely shell - and into the attentive gaze of an intangible man who becomes all too real....

Good writing

• By Linda on 02-04-24

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What listeners say about The Accidental Tourist

• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.3 out of 5.0
• 5 Stars 109
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.6 out of 5.0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

• Overall 4 out of 5 stars
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 4 out of 5 stars

Time capsule

I remember 1985 as feeling very modern. This book has helped me realize just how old fashioned the mores of that day were. The story is quirky and the characters are fluky. The best use of this book is to teach a child what the outskirts of the 80’x felt like.

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• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

Jefferson Mays is elite

Mays could read a dishwasher manual seem timeless and wondrous. This novel started a bit slowly for me but as the characters grew in unexpected ways, so did the plots. A contemplative walk thru the meaning of love, marriage, family, work, and life.

It builds like a beautiful rolling snowball...

...with an ending that floats out of the book into your soft tissue. Much better than the hype, definitely more subtle too.

• Debby Patten

As Good or Better than the Film

This was a joy to listen to! I was afraid the film would have ruined it for me, but the book just added more texture.

Quietly charming

The characters are quirky and raw. None are perfect. I found myself sympathizing with each one in turn. This is not a story of flashy events, but one depicting deep meaning in the authentic struggles of everyday life.

who are we really within the life we’ve made?

I felt as though i d come to know almost all of the unique characters surrounding the protagonist. I was charmed by his gentle manner towards others and the matching voice the narrator gave him. I liked the way he meandered through life but when he realized more deeply than before, who he was, he took charge of his direction.

• Karen Vincent

Her Magnum Opus

Anne Tyler has always been a tricky author. Some of her books are wonderful and some leave me scratching my head at the ending. However, The Accidental Tourist is, in my opinion, the best book she has ever written. It's one I have read more than once and I really enjoyed this listen. The only thing that would have made it perfect would have been the late William Hurt doing the narration.

Always Great!

I have read and re-read this book over the years and I love it every time. Funny, sad, romantic, what more could you want? I don’t love all her books but this one is a gem.

One of Her Top Two Books

I have all Tyler's books in my library and only a few left to listen to. This one and Breathing Lessons are my favorites. The Accidental Tourist has a more definable plot line than most of Tyler's books which is probably why it was the one chosen to be made into a movie. I didn't care for the movie because I am not a fan of sulky Malkovich but I now see how he embodied the character. I didn't want to remember him in the role (virtually impossible) however because I would have preferred to let Anne paint him for me solo. The book wasn't gloomy like the movie with Malkovich.

• Overall 3 out of 5 stars
• Story 3 out of 5 stars

• Doctor Overbeeke

Seems to lose narrative drive as it goes on.

The movie was actually better. The book is too long and loses focus toward the end.

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• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction
• Family Life

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The accidental tourist audible audiobook – unabridged.

In this irresistible novel, Anne Tyler explores the slippery alchemy of attracting opposites, and the struggle to rebuild one’s life after unspeakable tragedy.

Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Despite Macon’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel upends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined.

A fresh and timeless tale of unexpected bliss, The Accidental Tourist showcases Tyler’s talents for making characters - and their relationships - feel both real and magical.

• Listening Length 12 hours and 43 minutes
• Author Anne Tyler
• Narrator Jefferson Mays
• Audible release date January 9, 2021
• Language English
• Publisher Recorded Books
• ASIN B08SHKKSDX
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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The Accidental Tourist / Ladder of Years

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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