NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a sparkling novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection.
Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.
But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.
An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler's signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation.
“Anne Tyler has every gift a great novelist needs: intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising. She has unembarrassed goodness as well.”
—New York Times Book Review
“If ever there was a perfect time for a new Anne Tyler novel, it’s now—and this one doesn’t disappoint . . . Heartwarming and very funny—one of Tyler’s best yet.”
—People
“Delicate and moving . . . Tyler’s voice remains as vital as ever.”
—Vanity Fair
“[A] heartwarming balm for jangled nerves. . . . Tyler’s novels are always worth scooping up.”
—NPR
“Entrancing . . . Tyler is an American Vermeer whose canvases keep opening whole worlds within compact frames. . . . As novelist Marilynne Robinson has observed, realism has been so predominant a literary style ‘that it is easy to forget it is a style.’ One of its flawless practitioners is Anne Tyler, whose fiction maps the sea changes of her characters in carefully calibrated, deceptively understated prose . . . Tyler is a keen-eyed but tenderhearted social observer.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Affecting . . . Tyler has the rare ability to evoke the ordinary with particularity.”
—The New Yorker
“There’s always good reason to celebrate a new Anne Tyler novel. . . . Who else can make words sparkle with humor and tenderness in quite this way? . . . Hilarious and poignant. . . . A master at the small domestic moments that stand in for large and universal truths, Tyler never disappoints. This is a wonderful novel.”
—Boston Globe
“A work that makes you want to live more attentively . . . [Tyler’s characters] are imagined with a curiosity and compassion seldom found in contemporary prose.”
—Financial Times
“Redhead by the Side of the Road is simply a delight . . . Tyler makes her craft look easy again.”
—The Missourian
