NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—a funny joyful
brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles from a boyfriend with
a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild.A quietly subversive
novel tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood motherhood and female aging.”
—Jennifer Haigh New York Times Book Review The Garretts take their first and last family
vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home but in some ways they have never
been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a
painter which means less time keeping house for her husband Robin. Their teenage daughters
steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily could not have less in common. Their youngest David is
already intent on escaping his family's orbit for reasons none of them understand. Yet as
these lives advance across decades the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably
but unmistakably through each generation. Full of heartbreak and hilarity French Braid is
classic Anne Tyler: a stirring uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that
illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives the impossibility of breaking free
from those who love us and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.
