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  • Published: 1 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407019604
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

Digging to America




A striking and joyous new look for the novels of one of the greatest storytellers of our time

Friday August 15th, 1997. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to two very different Baltimore families.

Every year, on the anniversary of 'Arrival Day' the two families celebrate together, with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as little Susan and Jin-ho take roots and become American.

**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**

'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce

'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali

'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks

'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

  • Published: 1 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407019604
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

About the author

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

Also by Anne Tyler

See all

Praise for Digging to America

Magnificent

Observer

Deliciously funny and sharply observed

Guardian

Wise and funny...a multidimensional exploration of what it means to belong, not only to a family but also to a nation

Sunday Times

Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel

Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail

Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous – its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility

Sunday Telegraph

Wise and funny...a multidimensional exploration of what it means to belong, not only to a family but also to a nation

Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Sunday Times

Warm and optimistic, this story about adoption raises issues of belonging and identity

Bel Mooney, The Times

The view from America may be darkening, but Anne Tyler's new novel sheds a warm light on the ordinary human needs and actions that shore up American ideals of ethnic integration, neighbourliness and family values

Terri Apter, Times Literary Supplement

A return to form by a great writer...beautifully done

Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous - its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility. So sure is her tone, so graceful her style, that the reader absorbs without literary indigestion a narrative constructed almost entirely of grand set pieces of domestic comedy... Articulated in her fine-grained prose, the pure kindliness of her finale expresses something of the forgotten goodness of the American dream

Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

Keen-eyed and funny

Victoria Lane, Daily Telegraph

Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel...her trademark blend of observant comedy and tragedy, and her window into the human heart, are gloriously apparent

Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail

There is so much truth here, as Tyler strips away the issue of ethnic difference to reach the heart of her complex and compelling matter

Julie Wheelwright, Indenpdent

Digging to America is another superb novel, warm-hearted and funny

Caroline Moore, Spectator

Deliciously funny and sharply observed

Lisa Allardice, Guardian

Tyler possesses a remarkable ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, which makes reading her work like tucking into tea and cake on a cosy Sunday afternoon

Kathryn Mille, Time Out

Full of excruciatingly comic set-pieces, this is an immensely satisfying, yet subtle, read

Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday

Tenderly observed and lifted by humour, Digging to America is a complex novel that asks if anyone can ever truly fit in. In answering that question Ms Tyler has woven her magic once again

Economist

A small exquisitely painted canvas. Don't miss it

Woman & Home

A magnificent piece of character drawing

Observer

As in her previous books, the writing here makes for wholesome, comforting fare, spiced as always with urbane wit and a knack for nailing the small truths behind fine details

Globe and Mail

In Digging to America, Tyler exhibits her knack for softening the sharp edges of human contact, showing people with smudges of vulnerability on their faces as they dig toward each other

Toronto Star

Her prose is at once unpretentious and elegiac, like a photograph by Dorothea Lange, and her imagery has staying power

New York Times

Deft and wise prose... [Tyler's] skill at turning everyday occurrences into amazing storytelling gets better and better

Sunday Express

There can hardly be a more American 20th-century writer than Anne Tyler. Anyone who has grown up with her books…has by now become familiar with her unflashy mastery of the national idiom, her dour whimsy, her tapestries of suffocating families

New York Times

Redemptive

Daily Telegraph

Magnificent

Observer

Deliciously funny and sharply observed

Guardian

Wise and funny...a multidimensional exploration of what it means to belong, not only to a family but also to a nation

Sunday Times

Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel

Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail

Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous – its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility

Sunday Telegraph