The Beginner's Goodbye

Yet again she has articulated the supreme difficulties of human communication in a calmly insightful exploration of love and truth, grief and reality

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

This is what Tyler does better than almost any contemporary writer. She peers at the forgotten areas of the everyday, the bits that are hard to pinpoint, yet make up the bulk of our relationships. And this, ultimately, is why she is such a satisfying writer: she looks at people - at life - from the inside out

Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times

Her stories are quite unlike anyone else's

Cressida Connolly, Daily Telegraph

A near flawless novel of love and loss...this exquisitely poignant but unsentimental portrait of a loving but tragic mismatch

Rosemary Goring, Sunday Herald (Glasgow)

Tyler writes with a generosity of spirit and an emotional truthfulness that makes you forget the bare mechanics of plot

David Robinson, Week

All Hail Anne Tyler

Sunday Times

She's a master storyteller and inventor of character

Vanessa Berridge, Daily Express

A funny, gently moving and insightful book

Liam Heylin, Irish Examiner

What could be mawkish and cloying is gentle and touching, not least because she is a very funny writer

Michael Prodger, Financial Times

In Tyler’s small slices of life there is poetry and wisdom

Elaine Showalter, Guardian

The ending teeters on the brink of sentimentality but such is her psychological insight, the truth of her writing, that if she says unlikely happy endings are possible, I believe her

Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express

This meticulous, gently humorous novel is concerned with the effects of grief, the stop-start nature of moving on and the role of friendships, however imperfect, in facing catastrophe. [Tyler] remains as gimlet-eyed as ever in portraying ordinary lives that have become unmoored

Metro

This novel's great achievement is to capture the tensions and subtleties of a married life cut short… I read [it] virtually in one sitting, but that's a fairly common experience with Anne Tyler books… I didn't want it to end. Which is also a fairly common Tyler thing

Viv Groskop, Independent on Sunday

The Beginner’s Goodbye is a very funny book…every incident is at once recognizably true to life and yet somehow utterly off-kilter

Edmund Gordon, Times Literary Supplement

The work of an artist at the peak of her powers... a brilliantly observed and mercifully unsentimental examination of the emotional arc of grief

Sarah Vine, The Times

Tyler uses simple, elegant prose to manifest her particular brands of realism and humour

Freya McClelland, Independent

Tyler distilled

Lady

Tyler strips away layers of everyday life to reveal the abyss of pain underneath but does so with such skill and sparkling wit it makes this a real celebration of life

Vanessa Berridge, Daily Express

A simple, subtle and really honest account of how one man, Aaron, deals with the darkly comic death of his dumpy, clever and brilliant wife Dorothy... I finished it in one sitting

Alix Walker, Stylist

Her novels assert, with acuity, compassion and inventive humour, the uniqueness and value of each human life... a carefully observed study of grief and its trajectory

Pamela Norris, Literary Review

Deeply rewarding novel about grief and hope, infused with gentle humour

Sunday Times

A perfectly judged and brilliantly executed novel of loss and recovery

Woman & Home

Acutely, tenderly observed. Tyler is excellent on the ways we endlessly misread even those closest to us

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Deeply rewarding

Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times

Richer and more alive than the best work almost any other writer is producing

Cressida Connolly, Daily Telegraph

Brims with wry perceptiveness and rueful humour

Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (Books of the Year)

The most touching novel [I read this year]

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday (Books of the Year)

Bitter sweet... Either a ghost story or a sideways portrait of a marriage

James Kidd, Independent (Books of the Year)