One of her top nine unconventional love stories, as shared at the Daily Express:Breathing Lessons by Anne TylerRead about the other entries on the list.
Anne Tyler - probably my favourite author of all time - sets all her novels in and around Baltimore, where she lives. When I first started reading Tyler as a teenager, I had never been there, but I was utterly drawn in by her sense of place, and the characters that people it.
Now, I visit Baltimore often - my husband has family there - so the city, and Tyler’s characters, have come to even more vivid life. I love all her novels, but none more than Breathing Lessons, which is an unconventional love story not only in terms of structure - it is set over just one day, on which a long-married couple, Ira and Maggie Moran, are driving to a funeral - but in subject matter, too.
So many love stories focus on the passion of a first encounter and its aftermath, but Tyler is unafraid to confront love’s more workaday side: the pushes and pulls of a long relationship; the strains exerted by family, personality, and having to earn a living. It is a master class in how a novel can distil entire lives, in all their ordinary glory, onto the page.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
