The Amateur Marriage
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  • Published: 3 July 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473512719
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 10 hr 38 min
  • Narrator: Blair Brown
Categories:

The Amateur Marriage

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Audiobook
3 Jul 2014
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From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel, spanning three generations, about a mismatched marriage - and its consequences.

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in the Polish neighbourhood of Baltimore, he was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervour, they were hastily wed. But they never should have married. Pauline, impulsive and impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, and judgemental, proceeds deliberately. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. A 17-year-old daughter disappears, and some years later this fractious pair is forced to rescue her little boy, named Pagan, from drug-infested San Francisco, to take him home and raise him.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more deeply into the complex entanglements of family life in this marvellous, multifaceted novel - one of Anne Tyler's finest.
  • Published: 3 July 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473512719
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 10 hr 38 min
  • Narrator: Blair Brown
Categories:

About the author

Anne Tyler

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.

portrait photo of Anne Tyler

Also by Anne Tyler

Three Days in June
Clock Dance
Ladder of Years
The Beginner's Goodbye
French Braid
Redhead by the Side of the Road
Vinegar Girl
See all

Praise for The Amateur Marriage

A brilliant writer…funny, tragic, wise

Lynne Truss, Independent

Anne Tyler is a formidably skilful story-teller, with every narrative trick at her effortless command

Daily Telegraph

Tyler's compelling, moving and often amusing tale is the story of any marriage - every page brings a smile of recognition to the reader

Daily Mail

The meanings of this beautifully written novel reach far wider than Baltimore. I shed a tear as I finished the Antons' story

Evening Standard

Tyler is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday

Observer

[An] astonishingly perceptive and near-perfect novel… If you are looking for a thoughtful, intelligent, page-turning read that centres on family life, provides a good dose of tragedy tempered by comedy…then The Amateur Marriage should fit the bill perfectly.

Reading Matters

A woundingly truthful but hugely compassionate portrait

Fanny Blake, Woman & Home

Mesmerising

The Economist

The meanings of this beautifully written novel reach far wider than Baltimore. I shed a tear as I finished the Antons' story

Paul Barker, Evening Standard

A brilliant writer...funny, tragic, wise

Lynne Truss, Independent

A warm, compelling read - and another brilliant showcase for Tyler's talent for taking a common experience and lifting it out of the ordinary

Daily Mirror

Tyler's compelling, moving and often amusing tale is the story of any marriage - every page brings a smile of recognition to the reader

Daily Mail
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