Explore the understated yet vital role of the spool in our lives. Learn about its etymology, original purpose, and relevance ...

“The trouble with dying,” a mother says in Anne Tyler’s new novel, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.” “But, Mom,” replies her daughter, “there is no ...

This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement. THAT’s the leafy Baltimore suburb where ...

The characters in "A Spool of Blue Thread" look like the same Baltimore family members we've socialized with for 50 years in Anne Tyler's fiction. In fact, everything about her new novel — from its ...

How does she do it? Each time I come to the end of a novel by Anne Tyler, I find myself asking this question. How does she do it? How does she construct such a complex narrative out of such simple ...

What makes it so good? Its subject is her most recognizable and essential one, family, its setting again Baltimore, its story told in her customarily sweet, wistful, comic voice. In other words, A ...

Anne Tyler on her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread, Elizabeth Harrower on publishing again after four decades and a close reading of Muriel Spark's manipulative Miss Jean Brodie. Show more Anne ...

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler (Knopf). This airy saga examines three generations of a Baltimore family. In warm, lucid prose, Tyler skips back and forth through the twentieth century to depict ...

Lili Nedved walks along a row of desks observing her students, who are hunched over their A-line skirt projects in silent concentration. The only sounds filtering through the airy space are the steady ...

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 ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. As I settled in to Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, I recognised with a shiver of delight the same feelings — ...