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THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST

by Anne Tyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 1985

How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's—to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home"—who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with—two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose—in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1985

ISBN: 0345452003

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985

LITERARY FICTION

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by Anne Tyler

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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Review: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

“People could, in fact, be used up -- could use each other up, could be of no further help to each other”

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Rereading: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler review — a 1980s divorce novel packed with pathos and humour

Revisiting a book in which the protagonist is a travel writer could be seen as perverse in our long year of confinement. However, there’s little risk of Fomo with Anne Tyler’s 1985 novel The Accidental Tourist (made into a film starring William Hurt in 1988). Macon Leary specialises in producing guides for business travellers who view foreign trips as a necessary evil, an exercise in damage limitation in which the principal aim is to avoid the exotic.

In Paris Macon dines at Burger King, scraping off the extra pickle that accompanies his “Whoppaire”. In London he seeks out scrambled eggs at the Yankee Delight and lamb chops at My American Cousin. For Macon — fond of devising new organisational systems and correcting others’ grammar —

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Kate Tuttle reviews Anne Tyler’s most recent novel, “Clock Dance,” in this week’s issue. In 1985, Larry McMurtry expounded on Tyler’s skill and talent while writing about “The Accidental Tourist” for the Book Review. Read an excerpt below:

One of the persistent concerns of this work is the ambiguity of family happiness and unhappiness. In “The Accidental Tourist” these themes cohere with high definition in the muted personality of Macon Leary, a Baltimore man in his early 40’s who writes travel guides for businessmen who, like himself, hate to travel.

Not long after we meet him, Macon is left to himself. Sarah, his wife of 20 years, leaves him. Macon and Sarah have had a tragedy: their 12-year-old son, Ethan, was murdered in a fast-food joint, his death an accidental byproduct of a holdup. With the ballast of his marriage removed, Macon immediately tips into serious eccentricity.

Miss Tyler shows the mingling of misery and contentment in the daily lives of her families, reminds us how alike — and yet distinct — happy and unhappy families can be.

The concept of an accidental tourist captures in a phrase something she has been saying all along, if not about life, at least about men: they are frequently accidental tourists in their own lives. Her men slump arond like tired tourists — friendly, likable, but not all that engaged. If they see anything worth seeing, it is usually because a determined woman thrusts it under their noses and demands that they pay some attention. The fates of these families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females. In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction.

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• Published: 7 February 1995
• ISBN: 9780099480013
• Imprint: Vintage
• Format: Paperback
• RRP: $22.99
• Contemporary fiction
• General & literary fiction

The Accidental Tourist

A striking and joyous new look for the novels of one of the greatest storytellers of our time

Discover a beautiful story about what it is to be human from Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling Anne Tyler

How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life?

After the loss of his son and the departure of his wife, Macon neatly folds his anguish back into place and adapts the household on to more efficient lines. But with the arrival of Muriel, an eccentric and vulnerable dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, his attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.

**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**

'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce

'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali

'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks

'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist , Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , Ladder of Years , Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread , Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance .

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons ; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

Also by Anne Tyler

Praise for The Accidental Tourist

Her masterpiece Daily Mail

Brilliant, funny, sad and sensitive Independent on Sunday

Everything this author writes is shot through with intelligent insight, humour and humanity Daily Mail

Anne Tyler gets better with every book, and this one is a triumph – funny, profound, sad and ultimately reassuring Sunday Telegraph

Warmly entertaining and sharply organised against cuteness or mush Guardian

The Accidental Tourist is one of Anne Tyler’s best books New York Times

A beautiful, incandescent, heartbreaking, exhilarating book… The Accidental Tourist cuts so close to the bone that it leaves one aching with pleasure and pain. Words fail me: one cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this Washington Post

I’m inspired by every word that she writes Woman & Home

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The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

• Publication Date: April 9, 2002
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• ISBN-10: 0345452003
• ISBN-13: 9780345452009
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The Accidental Tourist: A Novel Paperback – April 9, 2002

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date April 9, 2002
• Dimensions 5.13 x 0.76 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0345452003
• ISBN-13 978-0345452009
• Lexile measure 890L
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Editorial Reviews

From the back cover, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (April 9, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345452003
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345452009
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 890L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 0.76 x 8 inches
• #4,166 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #12,934 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• #41,486 in Contemporary Romance (Books)

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, BREATHING LESSONS, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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"Yes, that is my son," the man says, identifying the body in the intensive care unit. Grief threatens to break his face into pieces, and then something closes shut inside of him. He has always had a very controlled nature, fearful of emotion and revelation, but now a true ice age begins, and after a year his wife tells him she wants a divorce. It is because he cannot seem to feel anything.

"The Accidental Tourist" begins on that note of emotional sterility, and the whole movie is a journey toward a smile at the end.

The man's name is Macon Leary ( William Hurt ), and he writes travel books for people who detest traveling. He advises his readers on how to avoid human contact, where to find "American food" abroad and how to convince themselves they haven't left home. His own life is the same sort of journey, and maybe it began in childhood. His sister and two brothers still live together in the house where they were born, and any life outside of their routine would be unthinkable.

Macon's wife ( Kathleen Turner ) moves out, leaving him with the dog, Edward, who does like to travel and is deeply disturbed by the curious life his masters have provided for him. He barks at ghosts and snaps at strangers. It is time for Macon to make another one of his overseas research trips, so he takes the dog to be boarded at a kennel, and that's where he meets Muriel Pritchett ( Geena Davis ). Muriel has Macon's number from the moment he walks through the door. She can see he's a basket case, but she thinks she can help. She also thinks her young son needs a father.

Macon isn't so sure. He doesn't use the number she gives him. But later, when the dog trips him and he breaks his leg, he takes Edward back to the kennel, and this time he submits to a little obedience training of his own. He agrees to acknowledge that Muriel exists, and before long they are sort of living together (lust still exists in his body, but it lurks so far from the center of his feelings that sex hardly seems to cheer him up).

The peculiarity about these central passages in the film is that they are quite cheerful and sometimes even very funny, even though Macon himself is mired in a deep depression. Davis, as Muriel, brings an unforced wackiness to her role in scenes like the one where she belts out a song while she's doing the dishes. But she is not as simple as she sometimes seems, and when Macon gets carried away with a little sentimental generalizing about the future, she warns him, "Don't make promises to my son that you are not prepared to keep." There is also great good humor in the characters in Macon's family: brothers Porter ( David Ogden Stiers ) and Charles ( Ed Begley Jr.) and sister Rose ( Amy Wright ), a matriarch who feeds the family, presides over their incomprehensible card games and supervises such traditional activities as alphabetizing the groceries on the kitchen shelves. One evening Macon takes his publisher, Julien ( Bill Pullman ), home to dinner and Julien is struck with a thunderbolt of love for Rose. He eventually marries her, but a few weeks later Julien tells Macon that Rose has moved back home with the boys; she was concerned that they had abandoned regular meals and were eating only gorp.

This emergency triggers the movie's emotional turning point, which is subtle but unmistakable. Nobody knows Rose as well as Macon does, and so he gives Julien some very particular advice: "Call her up and tell her your business is going to pieces. Ask if she could just come in and get things organized. Get things under control. Put it that way.

Use those words. Get things under control, tell her." In context, this speech is hilarious. It is also the first time in the film that Macon has been able to extend himself to help anybody, and it starts him on the road to emotional growth. Clinging to the sterility and loneliness that has been his protection, he doesn't realize at first that he has turned the corner. He still doubts that he needs Muriel, and when she buys herself a ticket and follows him to Paris, he refuses to have anything to do with her. When his wife also turns up in Paris, there is a moment when he thinks they may be able to patch things together again, and then finally Macon arrives at the sort of moment he has been avoiding all of his life: He has to make a choice. But by then the choice is obvious; he has already made it, by peeking so briefly out of his shell.

The screenplay for "The Accidental Tourist," by Kasdan and Frank Galati , is able to reproduce a lot of the tone and dialogue of the Anne Tyler novel without ever simply being a movie version of a book. The textures are too specific and the humor is too quirky and well-timed to be borrowed. The filmmakers have reinvented the same story in their own terms. The movie is a reunion for Kasdan, Hurt and Turner, who all three launched their careers with " Body Heat " (1981). Kasdan used Hurt again in " The Big Chill " (1983) and understands how to employ Hurt's gift for somehow being likable at the same time he seems to be withdrawn.

What Hurt achieves here seems almost impossible: He is depressed, low-key and intensely private through most of the movie, and yet somehow he wins our sympathy. What Kasdan achieves is just as tricky; I've never seen a movie so sad in which there was so much genuine laughter. "The Accidental Tourist" is one of the best films of the year.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Accidental Tourist (1989)

121 minutes

Kathleen Turner as Sarah

William Hurt as MacOn

Ed Begley Jr. as Charles

David Ogden Stiers as Porter

Geena Davis as Muriel

Amy Wright as Rose

Bill Pullman as Julian

Robert Gorman as Alexander

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Screenplay by

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• John Williams

Photographed by

• John Bailey

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• Charles Okun
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Directed by.

• Lawrence Kasdan

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The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Spy by Ajay Chowdhury; A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray; The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz; The Innocents by Bridget Walsh; The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore

The Spy by Ajay Chowdhury ( Harvill Secker , £18.99 ) The fourth novel in Chowdhury’s series sees the former Kolkata policeman turned Met officer Kamil Rahman recruited by MI5 to foil a terrorist plot that’s being hatched in an east London mosque. His attempts to win the trust of the plotters take him to the heart of the Kashmir conflict, an appalling hell-brew of nationalism, personal greed, brutality and suffering. Meanwhile, Brick Lane restaurateur Anjoli, his old friend and sometime employer, also finds herself in danger when she helps family friends investigate the kidnap of their teenage son, who manages to convey clues to his whereabouts by messages referencing the Harry Potter books (readers may realise this rather sooner than Anjoli does, but there’s plenty of exciting distraction while waiting for her to cop on). The plot races to a splendidly dramatic ending; Chowdhury’s writing is compelling and compassionate, especially on the themes of displacement, and divided loyalties personal and political.

A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray ( Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99 ) Al has found his own solution to the high cost of renting. It’s an unofficial form of house-sitting: breaking, entering and squatting luxury properties while their rich owners are away. Al calls himself an “interloper”, and prides himself on his skill and methodology. However, he is writing his story on a prison computer, so we know, from the off, that things haven’t gone exactly to plan. A series of unexpected developments results in his reluctantly teaming up with three other interlopers, then turning detective when the group become suspects in the murder of one of the house-owners. The hit-and-miss observational comedy could do with a trim, but a propulsive plot, an ingenious narrator and lashings of intrigue make this a genuine and thoroughly enjoyable page-turner.

The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz , translated by Rachel Ward ( Orenda, £9.99 ) The seventh book in award-winning German author Buchholz’s excellent Hamburg-based Chastity Riley series has the public prosecutor investigating a series of neatly parcelled male body parts discovered in the River Elbe. The murdered men, all of whom are known abusers of women, can’t be said to be a great loss to the world, but nevertheless, Chastity must do her job. Meanwhile, her best friend Carla has been raped by two men in the basement of the cafe she owns, and the police are showing very little enthusiasm for tracking down the perpetrators. At what point does one decide that enough is enough and take matters into one’s own hands? Beautifully concise, with commendably sparse prose, dark humour and an appealing protagonist, this in an uncompromising, provocative and righteously fierce examination of the ways in which law and society repeatedly fail 50% of the population.

The Innocents by Bridget Walsh ( Gallic , £12.99 ) Like its predecessor, The Tumbling Girl , which introduced writer-turned-investigator Minnie Ward and her partner in crime-solving, former policeman Albert Easterbrook, Walsh’s second novel is set in late 19th-century London theatreland. Albert continues to solve crime, while Minnie has turned her attention to saving the financially beleaguered Variety Palace music hall. But then the proprietor’s pet monkey goes missing, and a series of apparently unconnected deaths turn out to be linked to a tragedy 14 years earlier, when an audience stampede during a pantomime resulted in the suffocation of 183 children. Walsh, who clearly knows her Victorians, writes with gusto. Whether she’s detailing the sweat, greasepaint and trickery behind theatrical illusion, the bloody savagery of the dog-fighting pit, or the creepily anthropomorphic world of the taxidermy diorama, time past is so vividly evoked that one can almost smell it. Highly recommended.

The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore (Magpie, £16.99) There’s more sleight of hand and derring-do on show in Syd Moore’s latest, which is set in the summer of 1940, when Britain was preparing to repel the Nazi invading force. It’s based, at least in part, on real events. Magician’s assistant Daphne Devine and her boss Jonty Trevelyan, AKA the Grand Mystique, are co-opted by MI5 to work with a group drawn from the worlds of theatre, fashion, zoology and the circus. Their brief is to exploit the German High Command’s belief in the occult by creating a plausible and spectacular magic ritual, which will be reported back to Hitler as proof that Britain is able to harness supernatural forces. Although the wandering point of view is slightly disconcerting, this is a well-researched, vivid and thoroughly entertaining Girl’s Own adventure, with a brave and resourceful heroine who acquits herself well against both the enemy and the endless macro-aggressions from entitled men on her own side. More, please.

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