Tyler takes just pages - perhaps even just paragraphs - to weave dialogue into a dynamic we can understand. We are dragged into their lives, forced to care about them, and yet they are complex, annoying, difficult, selfish and lovable. And that is how most characters are in this book. I lost the exact quote but I recall one point when a character is described as being 'like most people - insufferable but likable'.

This is a book about the Whitshank family - several generations of it. Anne Tyler is apparently one of those authors who can take such a simplistic story of family life and breathe so much humanity into her characters that the everyday becomes compelling. There are those who try to mimic the successful few but they almost always fail. Very few authors can successfully turn the mundane into art. Sometimes there are those rare books that capture pieces of real life in such a way that you look at the ordinary as you have never looked at it before.

And yet, that was more than enough to make this one of my favourite, beautifully-written character studies. I'm not going to sell it as anything it isn't - fans of fast-paced action and fantasy should look elsewhere - because this is a quiet, moving family drama nothing more or less. 'The trouble with dying,' she'd told Jeannie once, 'is that you don't get to see how everything turns out.

Brimming with the luminous insight, humor, and compassion that are Anne Tyler's hallmarks, this capacious novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.

And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father. The whole family-their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog-is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. 'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon.' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author-now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career-a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life.

A spool of blue thread