This laborious style of storytelling gives the author incredible authority as an-powerful-all knowing-omniscient narrator. There are long passages of ordinary speech, rhythmic descriptions of community life, followed by tedious family arguments. Her intention is not to focus on one protagonist, but the entire Whitshank family tree.

Tyler waits until the last quarter of the book to finally unveil any drama. These three stories give us some narrative structure, but not a whole lot. It covers much of the twentieth century with three narratives: the period where Red and Abby Whitshank are in the latter years of their lives (up to 2012), when they first meet in 1959 and when Junior and Linnie - Red’s parents - fell in love under controversial circumstances in the late 1920s. Like much of Tyler’s previous work, the novel is a celebration of the mundane and the quotidian tasks that make up day-to-day living. There are no heroic violent adventures in the quiet, settled, suburban neighbourhood of Hampden, where the story takes place in A Spool of Blue Thread, her 20th work of fiction to date.

But this world is light years away from The Wire. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father.After the success of David Simon’s The Wire, Baltimore became associated - for many television fans at least - with derelict high rises, African American teenagers who seemed perpetually doomed to a life of poverty and crime, drunken cops and extraordinary heroes and villains who live each day as if it’s their last.Īnne Tyler, since the publication of her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes in 1964, has written predominately about characters whose lives are centred in Baltimore. The whole family-their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog-is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before.

'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon.' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. 'From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author-now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career-a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life.

A spool of blue thread