Digging to America

Digging to America
Anne Tyler
RRP:
NZ$ 28.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 23.19
Paperback
h197 x 130mm - 336pg
19 Apr 2007 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9780099499398
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Friday, August 15th, 1997. The night the girls arrived. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun, tenacious Bitsv (who believes fervently that life can always be improved), two full sets of grandparents and a host of big-boned, confident relatives, taking delivery with characteristic razzmatazz. "Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba (her family 'only one generation removed from the bazaar') and carefully assimilated ,Saint, with his elegant, elusive Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, the grandmother-to-be, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion. Every year, on the anniversary of Arrival Day' their two extended families celebrate together, with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan, wholesome, stocky Jin-ho and, later, her new little sister Xiu-Mei, take roots, become American... While Maryam, the optimistic pessimist, confident that if things go wrong - as well they may - she will manage as she has before, contrarily preserves her `outsider' status, as if to prove that, despite her passport, she is only a guest in this bewildering country. Full of achingly hilarious moments (Xiu-Mei's 'pacifier party is worthy of The Siinpsons) and toe-curling misunderstandings, Digging to America is a novel with a deceptively small domestic canvas, and large themes - it's about belonging and otherness, about insiders and outsiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds... And the end catches you by the throat, ambushes your emotions as only Tyler can.
"The view from America may be darkening, but Anne Tyler's new novel sheds a warm light on the ordinary human needs and actions that shore up American ideals of ethnic integration, neighbourliness and family values" -- Terri Apter Times Literary Supplement "Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel...her trademark blend of observant comedy and tragedy, and her window into the human heart, are gloriously apparent" -- Elizabeth Buchan Daily Mail "Deliciously funny and sharply observed" -- Lisa Allardice Guardian "Wise and funny...a multidimensional exploration of what it means to belong, not only to a family but also to a nation" -- Lucy Hughes-Hallet Sunday Times "Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous - its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility. So sure is her tone, so graceful her style, that the reader absorbs without literary indigestion a narrative constructed almost entirely of grand set pieces of domestic comedy... Articulated in her fine-grained prose, the pure kindliness of her finale expresses something of the forgotten goodness of the American dream" -- Jane Shilling Sunday Telegraph
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and many other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Saint Maybe, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet, Back When We Were Grownups, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America and The Beginner's Goodbye. In 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English' and in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, which recognises a lifetime's achievement in books. Her most recent novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was a Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780099499398
Published: 19 Apr 2007
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Vintage
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
Height: 197mm
Width: 130mm
Pages: 336
Dewey: 813.54

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