The Amateur Marriage Anne Tyler by Anne Tyler 9781400042982, 1400042984, B0031RS93Y instant download after payment.

From the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons comes a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage, and its consequences spanning three generations.

“She traces the stormy union of two people who love but can’t stand each other.”  -  Kirkus Reviews

They seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighbourhood of Baltimore, walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervour, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married. 

“An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life.”  -  Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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 fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

“This ‘wickedly good’ author has come to represent the best of today’s American literature… She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday… Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric.”  -  Lisa Allardice, The Observer