The glorious Sunday Times bestseller follows one family’s joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and secrets, from the 1950s right up to today

When Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice.

All she wants is space and silence. No clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.

But it turns out family life is impossible to escape - particularly when it’s in your past. For Mercy it all begins in 1959, with a holiday to a cabin by a lake. It’s the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations.

ANNE TYLER

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.