Anne Tyler

Michael and Pauline seem like the perfect couple - he was smitten the first time he saw her in Baltimore. In the heat of the moment, in World War II, they were hastily wed. But perhaps they should never have married.

When Joe Davitch first saw Rebecca he wanted for himself some of the happiness that spilled from her. Once married she became the lynch pin of the Davitch family. After Joe's untimely death Rebecca realises that she feels like an imposter in her own life.

Anne Tyler's novel covers the events of a day in the lives of Maggie and Ira. The basic incompatibility of their marriage and the love that binds them together nevertheless are both revealed.

Jeremy is a child-like, painfully shy batchelor who has never left home. He lives on the third floor of his mother's boarding house and spends his days cutting up coloured paper to make mosaic sculptures - until the day his mother dies and the beautiful Mary Tell arrives to turn his world upside down.

One day, Willa Drake receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore to look after a young woman she's never met. This impulsive decision will lead Willa into uncharted territory, and surrounded by eccentric neighbours who treat each other like family, she finds solace and fulfillment in unexpected places.

Having sacked her handyman, newly-widowed Mrs Emerson finds a replacement in Elizabeth, a lanky, awkward girl. The Emersons - there are seven grown-up children - have a reputation for craziness and Elizabeth finds herself drawn into their disorderly lives against her will. But in the end it is hard to tell whether she is a victim of the needy Emersons, or the de facto ruler of the family.

In August 1997 two Korean baby girls are flown to Baltimore to be adopted by two very different American families. Over the years the families' lives overlap, especially at the annual party to celebrate 'Arrival Day'. A gentle and funny story of pride, belonging and love.

Shared memories bind together all families and the Tulls of Baltimore are no exception. Abandoned by her husband, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone and now, as she lies dying, the past and its secrets are unlocked.

For thirty-five year old Charlotte Emory, leaving her husband seems to offer the only way out from the mundaneness of every day life's earthly possessions and emotional complications. In the bank, she withdraws enough money to escape a life and a marriage gone sour. But Charlotte is about to escape in a way she never expected, as a young bank robber takes her hostage, and they head south for Florida in a stolen car.

he major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author -- a brilliantly perceptive, painfully true and funny journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today

When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice.

Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won't allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.

Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts' family life over the decades, from giving a child a ride to a painstaking Easter lunch, a fateful train journey to an unexpected homecoming.

And it all begins in 1959, with a family 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.

Ben Joe is the only boy in a family of six sisters, Mama and Gram. He is studying for a law degree in New York when he hears his eldest sister Joanne has left her husband and returned home with her baby girl. Out of a mixture of homesickness and duty Ben Joe returns to the home in which he has always felt like an outsider.

Cordelia Grinstead, on holiday with her husband and family, went for a walk along the beach and just kept walking - away from her family and her life!

Morgan Gower has an outsize hairy beard, an array of peculiar costumes and fantastic headwear, and a serious smoking habit. He likes to pretend to be other people - a jockey, a shipping magnate, a foreign art dealer - and he likes to do this more and more since his massive brood of daughters are all growing up, getting married and finding him embarrassing. Then comes his first dramatic encounter with Emily and Leon Meredith, and the start of an extraordinary obsession.

Liam Pennywell has taken early retirement from his teaching job in a run-down private school and moved into a condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. A day later he wakes up in hospital with a sore and bandaged head and no memory of what has happened. This leads him to meet an unusual woman who also has secrets to hide.

Barnaby Gailtin has less in life than he once had: His ex-wife left him and their native Baltimore several years ago, taking their baby daughter with her, and he has acquired an unalterably fixed position as the black sheep of the family in a family where black sheep aren't tolerated. Then the angelic Sophia enters his life and it seems as if all this is set to change. But can he shake off his past?

Micah Mortimer isn't the most polished person you'll ever meet. His numerous sisters and in-laws regard him oddly but very fondly, but he has his ways and means of navigating the world. He measures out his days running errands for work - his TECH HERMIT sign cheerily displayed on the roof of his car - maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7:15, every morning). He is content with the steady balance of his life. But then the order of things starts to tilt. His woman friend Cassia (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a 'girlfriend') tells him she's facing eviction because of a cat. And when a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son, Micah is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle. 

Ranging from the ragtime era to small-town America in the seventies, Searching for Caleb is a moving quest for a family's deepest roots - and a haunting story of growing up and breaking away, acceptance and rebellion.

In a small Southern town teenager Evie Decker becomes obsessed with local rock singer Bertram 'Drumstrings' Casey, and decides to take her life into her own hands. When she carves his name on her forehead their two lives become unforgettably entwined in this remarkable novel.

'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…'

This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. 

From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red's father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home…

It's the day before her daughter's wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job - or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn't even have a suit. Instead, he's brought memories, a shared sense of humour - and a cat looking for a new home.

Just as Gail is wondering what's next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret…

The day after the wedding, Gail and Max prepare to go their separate ways again. But all the questions about the future of the happy couple have stirred up the past for Gail. Because 'happy' takes many forms, and sometimes the younger generation has much to teach the older about secrets, acceptance and taking the rough with the smooth.

When young Janie Pike dies in a tragic accident, she leaves behind a family numbed with grief and torn with guilt and recrimination. In this compassionate and haunting novel Anne Tyler explores how each member of the family learns to face the future in their own way.

This modern retelling of Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' asks whether a thoroughly modern, independent woman would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as individual, off-beat and funny as Kate, the woman in question, herself.