


We might fairly think that some of the things she has said in recent interviews aren’t exactly engraved in stone, not least because French Braid, a warm family saga set between 1959 and the late summer of 2020, appears to represent a U-turn on her intuition that “it’d be really wrongheaded of me to suddenly start talking about the coronavirus at this stage in one of my books”. T his, blessedly, is now Anne Tyler’s fourth novel since she suggested that 2015’s A Spool of Blue Thread was going to be her last.
