The Beginner's Goodbye

When Dorothy came back from the dead, it seemed to Aaron that some people simply didn’t notice.

The accident that killed Dorothy – involving an oak tree, a sun porch and some elusive biscuits – leaves Aaron bereft and the house a wreck.

A terrific writer... She's changed my perception on life'

Deeply rewarding novel about grief and hope, infused with gentle humour

A near flawless novel of love and loss ... exquisitely poignant but unsentimental

She's a master storyteller and inventor of character

This novel's great achievement is to capture the tensions and subtleties of a married life cut short… I read it virtually in one sitting, but that's a fairly common experience with Anne Tyler books… I didn't want it to end. Which is also a fairly common Tyler thing

Richer and more alive than the best work almost any other writer is producing

This is what Tyler does better than almost any contemporary writer. She peers at the forgotten areas of the everyday, the bits that are hard to pinpoint... She looks at people -- at life -- from the inside out.

Brilliantly observed and mercifully unsentimental

Yet again she has articulated the supreme difficulties of human communication in a calmly insightful exploration of love and truth, grief and reality.

Her stories are quite unlike anyone else's

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.