Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12982 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Bernice Harrison, Irish Times
`Another treat for fans of this superb storyteller... a terrific read.'

Sunday Express
`Deft and wise prose ... [Tyler's] skill at turning everyday
occurrences into amazing storytelling gets better and better'

Sunday Times
Another of the author's unceasingly perceptive inquires into what
makes us tick'

Customer Reviews

A small book with big questions
I love Anne Tyler's work. She writes about the ordinary and every day events that we take so much for granted, but in a way that makes us really think about and question what is happening. This book is no exception. The main event is more unusual than in her other books, as it centres around the adoption of two Korean girls by two very different families. Although they apparently have little in common other than the adoptions, the families meet each year to celebrate the day that their daughters arrived in the USA and into their lives. This apparently simple storyline raises much bigger questions and makes the reader think about things such as how do we create our national identity? What is a family? And why had I never thought to hold a 'raking party' to clear my garden in the autumn (seriously, it's a great idea!) The characters are, as always in Tyler's books, well-drawn and each is given an opportunity to tell part of the story through their own eyes. A really charming book that will stay with you long after you finish it.

Tyler on top form
Reading her books you get the impression that Anne Tyler could watch a couple from a distance and know by their gestures what they were saying to one another. Many great novelists can do that. Where Tyler stands out is that she would also know why they there were saying what they were saying even, and here's the best bit, if the couple lacked the same insight themselves.

She uses this gift to bring to life the most intriguing nuances from the most routine of domestic encounters and in "Digging to America" she proves these powers are undiminished. That alone would commend the novel, but Tyler does not stop there. She develops a convincing meditation on the many facets of ethnic integration alternately through the poignant awakenings of her Iranian heroine Maryam who has taken a generation to adapt to America, neatly counter-pointed against the first steps of two adopted Korean babies one of whom is Maryam's first Grand-child.

Her characters also cope with bereavement and a little serious illness, and yet the light touch that makes her novels and observations so accessible does not desert her.

Critics rave about this author for a reason. Discover for yourself. You won't be disappointed.

Excellent!
As an adoptive parent of two children born in Korea, and as a foreigner living abroad myself, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. My sister in law, a native in the country in which I have lived for the past fifteen years, and who has never been a long-term foreign citizen anywhere, did not understand this book. She was almost apologetic when she loaned it to me, but she thought I would like it because of the two characters who were adopted from Korea. I, on the other hand, loved Digging to America from cover to cover.

When Marjam said that she will always be a foreigner--both at "home" in Iran, as well as in the USA--I knew I had found an author who understood what it is really like to be transplanted. That it involved Korean adoption seemed to be a secondary theme.

If a person doesn't care for this book, it will be because they either lack the empathy to understand what it's like to be a foreigner in a different culture, or because they believed it to be a book about Korean adoption when it's really about something much deeper than that.

A must read for anybody who has struggled with their identity as a result of having changed countries and cultures.