Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II fervour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counter-culture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, we watch their lives unspool and see the consequences of their very mismatched marriage.

OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD

Shes changed my perception on life Anna Chancellor

One of my favourite authors Liane Moriarty

She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan

Anne Tyler has no peer Anita Shreve

My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world Nick Hornby

A masterly author Sebastian Faulks

Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good John Updike

I love Anne Tyler Anita Brookner

Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour Eudora Welty

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels includeBreathing 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 Threadand Vinegar Girl.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize forBreathing 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 2015A Spool of Blue Threadwas aSunday Timesbestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.