We meet them on a rare holiday to a Maryland lake, with the girls in their teens and their younger brother a curious seven-year-old happiest playing make-believe with his toys. Set, as usual, in Baltimore, it’s the story of the Garretts: husband and wife Robin and Mercy, children Alice, Lily and David. Responding to a question about whether Covid might break her aversion to putting topical elements in her work, she said: “It would derail the small private story I’m trying to tell.”Īfter her previous novel, the terrific Redhead By the Side of the Road, generously centred on the blinkered perspective of a middle-aged IT guy, French Braid returns to type: a multigenerational ensemble piece that will have fans marking their Tyler bingo cards, from empty nesters taking later-life left turns and family rifts surrounding odd-one-out siblings. We might fairly think that some of the things she has said in recent interviews aren’t exactly engraved in stone, not least because French Braid, a warm family saga set between 1959 and the late summer of 2020, appears to represent a U-turn on her intuition that “it’d be really wrongheaded of me to suddenly start talking about the coronavirus at this stage in one of my books”.

T his, blessedly, is now Anne Tyler’s fourth novel since she suggested that 2015’s A Spool of Blue Thread was going to be her last.

Anne tyler french braid review