Tyler’s books are sometimes about dark events – unhappy families, humiliations, stark and sudden losses – and sometimes they are more humorous as they explore human foibles and our inability to connect. Tyler captures the oddity of family life, where people who may have little in common are forced into close quarters, like strangers clinging to the same life raft. Through the generations of the Garrett family, attitudes change, people die, are born, marry, divorce, but patterns recur – hence the slightly laboured analogy of the ripples left by a French braid after the hair is untied. Their three children are equally unalike, so that teenager Alice thinks an observer of them on the beach would assume they were strangers, each having a dramatically different experience in the same space. Mercy loves to paint and is absorbed in her inner life, Robin is practical and conventional. The party are an apparently ill-matched couple in Mercy and Robin Garrett, and their three children. It begins with a holiday by a lake in 1959. There are family secrets and rivalries, awkward get-togethers, tensions and estrangements, precious moments of connection. This leads into the story of the Garrett family, told over three generations, beginning in the fifties and ending during the pandemic.Įach chapter relates a different event and period. 'A faultless novel, effortlessly profound.French Braid begins in 2010 as a young couple return on a train from a family visit, discussing their different backgrounds and how they have been shaped by them.

'Such joyous immersion, I lost myself, and loved this superbly imperfect family' TESSA HADLEY

'Exquisitely crafted, tender, hilarious, devastatingly precise, I loved this powerful meditation on the small and often unvoiced moments that can make up a life' RACHEL JOYCE ' French Braid is Anne Tyler at her surgical, spare best' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch' MARIAN KEYES It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations. Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that form s the Garretts' family life over the decades, whether that's a painstaking Easter lunch or giving a child a ride, a fateful train journey or an unexpected homecoming.Īnd it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake.

Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone is determined not to notice. THE MAJOR NEW NOVEL FROM ONE OF THE GREATEST STORYTELLERS OF OUR TIMEĪ brilliantly perceptive, painfully true and funny journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today

Reviews of french braid by anne tyler