‘A Spool of Blue Thread’ by Anne Tyler Knopf, 368 pp., $25.95 “The trouble with dying,” a mother says in Anne Tyler’s new novel, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out.

So: “A Spool of Blue Thread” is “middlebrow,” yes. Plainspoken, yes. Still convinced of the family as the cornerstone of American life, yes.

A Spool of Blue Thread, her 20th novel, is not her best, but it features some characters and passages as strong as any she has written.

“A Spool of Blue Thread,’’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler’s new book, is a thoughtful and intriguing study of the role of memory in creating and destroying the stories we tell ...

But A Spool of Blue Thread is a flight forward – a liberation, in the way it chooses to escape the Whitshank family in order to describe them. Tyler, who's 73, has nothing left to prove.

“A Spool of Blue Thread” is vintage Anne Tyler, a truthful yet always gentle investigation of human nature’s rich variety.

In "A Spool of Blue Thread," the longtime Baltimore author's 20th novel and among her finest, the source of that loss is old age and the rapidly approaching grave. Never before has the theme of ...

That house, with its long front porch, more than any other in Anne Tyler’s work, is central to A Spool of Blue Thread, It’s not a Manderley or Tara, but it serves as the same kind of ...

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler (Knopf). This airy saga examines three generations of a Baltimore family. In warm, lucid prose, Tyler skips back and forth through the twentieth century to ...

May-lee Chai's latest novel is Tiger Girl. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. [email protected] A Spool of Blue Thread Anne Tyler (Knopf, $25.95) ...

'A Spool of Blue Thread' by Anne Tyler: EW reviewNot much ever really happens in most Tyler novels, including this one, but they still make for absorbing and deeply satisfying reads. Without ...