Product Description

This is another quiet masterpiece from the author of "The Accidental Tourist" - a funny, poignant and unsettling novel about marriage, families and the triumph of hope over experience. On a beach holiday, 40-year-old Cordelia Grinstead walks away from her family, and just keeps walking. She re-invents herself in a new town as a serious-minded woman without ties. But gradually the messy emotions of family life catch up with her once more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50608 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover
From the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and The Accidental Tourist

On a beach holiday, forty-year-old Cordelia Grinstead, dressed only in swimsuit and beachrobe, walks away from her family and just keeps on walking…

‘Every scene breathes with intimacy.Lifelikeness almost lifts the characters off the page. Ladder of Years ruefully contemplates the unhaltable passage of time.But, scintillating with joie de vivre, it also offers an intensely appealing way of passing it’ Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

‘Anne Tyler’s novels have three qualities that make them special: they are funny, they are sad, they are intelligent’
Nick Hornby

‘Dialogue tope-rate, people alive to the fingertips, places as real as next door – you don’t get a finer comedy of manners than this’
David Hughes, Mail on Sunday

About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her 11th novel Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and her latest novel Digging to America was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Customer Reviews

My favourite Anne Tyler after Dinner at the Homesick Restaur
For me this book is highly memorable. As a mother and wife how many of us want, just sometimes, to be ourselves, regain our own identities divorced from family ties and opt out of this fully committed existence. Of course this is never more than a fantasy, we don't really want this and it's never an optionm hence the fascination with someone like Delia who dares to abandon everything and reinvent herself. I don't think I would have rated the book so highly had I not been able to identify with Delia so completely.

Ever Want to Walk Away???
Delia does what we all wish we could do at some point in our lives. She walks out on her life. Not because it's terrible or too hard, but because you feel like it. Who knows what the reason is? You need a change. You want to see what else is out there. The question of why will eat away at your mind while reading this novel and you'll never find a suitable answer. What Anne Tyler does in this novel is build a fictional story within a story. This woman creates a little world within her own world in which she feels space to breathe. A small apartment with a local library: what a perfect little escape. Every small action she performs within this world has something tremendously sacred attached to it because it belongs wholly to her. It is a chance for her to find out who she is again. After so many years of living in the role of a mother and having that image dominate the way in which people look at her, she is able to stand in the mirror and see herself as an independent woman. We should all be allowed small opportunities of selfishness from time to time. Delia is simply making up for lost time with the time she takes away from her family. You might think that it is inevitable she would return to her old life, but it isn't. It is her decision if she wants to go back or not and it is a hard one. This is the thrilling thing about this novel and it is why it is one of my favorite. Along with Delia, you are in completely unfamiliar territory where you feel the central character is empowered to direct her own destiny rather than the author or any of the other characters in the novel. You discover that we all have the choice to plunge into a well of potential and remerge as someone completely new. Each person is first and always in charge of whom he or she wants to be and if he or she needs to take dramatic measures to reclaim his or her identity than he or she should.

Not one of her very best I'm afraid
Despite being a committed fan of Anne Tyler I must confess to momentary hesitation when purchasing this early (1982) novel, unattracted by the title and unconvinced by the uncharacteristically-insipid book jacket. Looking back it does cross my mind that I should have heeded my instinct.

In this story Tyler shows yet again how adept she is at assembling life-like characters with concise descriptions and only fragments of dialogue, and how imaginative she is in plotting the events they encounter.

Here, though, many of the fringe characters are clichés rendering their contributions artificial (for example, Donald and Melinda Hawser who run into the lead character at a Thanksgiving dinner). Whether that is down to the vintage (and I don't mean the publisher) of the novel or not, it ultimately results in the experience being worth less than the five stars which I usually, and unhesitatingly, award her books.