Produktdetails
- Verlag
- Random House LCC US
- Erschienen
- 2021
- Sprache
- English
- Seiten
- 192
- Infos
- 192 Seiten
203 mm x 128 mm - ISBN
- 978-0-593-08094-8
Besprechung
THE BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE
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
Pitch-perfect . . . Tyler is now, as she has long been, at the height of her powers.
Washington City Paper
What a joy it is to open a new novel from Anne Tyler . . . The qualities that have served her and her readers so well are still strong in her fiction telling details, realistic dialogue and interactions, the rare ability to look at ordinary people and find rich depths of humanity that enlighten us all. She presents all this with just the right mix of humor and pathos. It s no wonder her books ring true to so many people.
News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
Exquisite . . . Tyler s wit and humanity seem to be as vigorous as ever.
Anniston Star (Alabama)
A fully realised world full of dry humour . . . Each character is deftly drawn in a few lines.
The Times (UK)
Another gem from Anne Tyler . . . Tyler has won so many plaudits over the past 50 odd years that it s hard to think of new superlatives to add . . . Tyler s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here.
Observer (UK)
Delightful . . . Tyler is a magician . . . You finish her novels feeling closer to life, and closer to other people.
Mail on Sunday (UK)
Anne Tyler may, in the end, prove to be one of the most influential novelists of her generation . . . Her books are so irresistibly readable that it s startling to realise what technical marvels they often are.
Daily Telegraph
Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best. This joyful book is a powerful reminder of how much we need human connection.
BookPage (starred)
Tyler s warmly comedic, quickly read tale, a perfect stress antidote, will delight her fans and provides an excellent first for readers new to this master of subtle and sublime brilliance . . . Perfectly modulated, instantly enmeshing, heartrending, funny, and redemptive.
Booklist
Characteristically tender . . . Suffused with feeling and very moving.
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Textauszug
Chapter 1
You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone. At seven fifteen every morning you see him set out on his run. Along about ten or ten thirty he slaps the magnetic TECH HERMIT sign onto the roof of his Kia. The times he leaves on his calls will vary, but not a day seems to go by without several clients requiring his services. Afternoons he can be spot- ted working around the apartment building; he moonlights as the super. He ll be sweeping the walk or shaking out the mat or conferring with a plumber. Monday nights, before trash day, he hauls the garbage bins to the alley; Wednesday nights, the recycling bins. At ten p.m. or so the three squinty windows behind the foundation plantings go dark. (His apartment is in the basement. It is probably not very cheery.)
He s a tall, bony man in his early forties with not-so-good posture head lunging slightly forward, shoulders slightly hunched. Jet-black hair, but when he neglects to shave for a day his whiskers have started coming in gray. Blue eyes, heavy eyebrows, hollows in his cheeks. A clamped-looking mouth. Unvarying outfit of jeans and a T-shirt or a sweat- shirt, depending on the season, with a partially-erased- looking brown leather jacket when it s really cold. Scuffed brown round-toed shoes that seem humble, like a school-boy s shoes. Even his running shoes are plain old dirty-white sneakers none of the fluorescent stripes and gel-filled soles and such that most runners favor and his shorts are knee- length denim cutoffs.
He has a girlfriend, but they seem to lead fairly separate lives. You see her heading toward his back door now and then with a sack of takeout; you see them setting forth on a weekend morning in the Kia, minus the TECH HERMIT sign. He doesn t appear to have male friends. He is cordial to the tenants but no more than that. They call out a greeting when they meet up with him and he nods amiably and raises a hand, often not troubling to speak. Nobody knows if he has family.
The apartment building s in Govans a small, three- story brick cube east of York Road in north Baltimore, with a lake-trout joint on the right and a used-clothing store on the left. Tiny parking lot out back. Tiny plot of grass in front. An incongruous front porch just a concrete slab stoop, really with a splintery wooden porch swing that nobody ever sits in, and a vertical row of doorbells next to the dingy white door.
Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it s almost certain nobody s ever asked him.
On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in. Usually his morning went: a run, a shower, then breakfast, and then a little tidy- ing up. He hated it when something interrupted the nor- mal progression. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen: EMILY PRESCOTT. An old lady; he had dealt with her often enough that her name was in his directory. Old ladies had the easiest problems to fix but the greatest number of fractious questions. They always wanted to know why. How come this happened? they would ask. Last night when I went to bed my computer was just fine and this morning it s all kerblooey. But I didn t do a thing to it! I was sound asleep!
Yeah, well, never mind, now I ve got it fixed, he would say.
But why did it need fixing? What made it go wrong?
That s not the kind of question you want to ask about a computer.
Why not?
On
Langtext
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.
Über den AutorIn
ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.