A Spool of Blue Thread

Zusatztext 53917530 Informationen zum Autor ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis! Minnesota! in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh! North Carolina. This is her twentieth novel; her eleventh! Breathing Lessons ! was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore! Maryland. Klappentext Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize "It was a beautiful! breezy! yellow-and-green afternoon. . ." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable! enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families! in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments! laughter! and celebrations! but also jealousies! disappointments! and carefully guarded secrets. From Red's father and mother! newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s! to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century! here are four generations of Whitshanks! their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling! lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.Brimming with all the insight! humor! and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler's work! A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish. Late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whitshank had a phone call from their son Denny. They were getting ready for bed at the time. Abby was standing at the bureau in her slip, drawing hairpins one by one from her scattery sand-colored topknot. Red, a dark, gaunt man in striped pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, had just sat down on the edge of the bed to take his socks off; so when the phone rang on the nightstand beside him, he was the one who answered. “Whitshank residence,” he said. And then, “Well, hey there.” Abby turned from the mirror, both arms still raised to her head. “What’s that,” he said, without a question mark. “Huh?” he said. “Oh, what the hell, Denny!” Abby dropped her arms. “Hello?” he said. “Wait. Hello? Hello?” He was silent for a moment, and then he replaced the receiver. “What?” Abby asked him. “Says he’s gay.” “What?” “Said he needed to tell me something: he’s gay.” “And you hung up on him!” “No, Abby. He hung up on me. All I said was ‘What the hell,’ and he hung up on me. Click! Just like that.” “Oh, Red, how could you?” Abby wailed. She spun away to reach for her bathrobe—a no-color chenille that had once been pink. She wrapped it around her and tied the sash tightly. “What possessed you to say that?” she asked him. “I didn’t mean anything by it! Somebody springs something on you, you’re going to say ‘What the hell,’ right?” Abby grabbed a handful of the hair that pouffed over her forehead. “All I meant was,” Red said, “?‘What the hell next, Denny? What are you going to think up next to worry us with?’ And he knew I meant that. Believe me, he knew. But now he can make this all my fault, my narrow-mindedness or fuddy-duddiness or whatever he wants to call it. He was glad I said that to him. You could tell by how fast he hung up on me; he’d been just hoping all along that I would say the wrong thing.” “All right,” Abby said, turning practical. “Where was he calling from?” “How would I know where he was calling from? He doesn’t have a fixed address, hasn’t been in touch all summer, already changed jobs twice that we know of and probably more that we don’t know of .?.?. A nineteen-year-old boy and we have no idea what part of the planet he’s on! You’ve got to wonder what’s wr...

Product details

• Authors: Anne Tyler
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 10.02.2015
• EAN: 9781101874271
• ISBN: 978-1-101-87427-1
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 245 mm x 33 mm
• Series: ALFRED A. KNOPF
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature