Kindle Price:	$12.99
Sold by:	Random House LLC Price set by seller.

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add an

audiobook with Audible narration for $12.99

Audiobook Price: $13.13

Save: $0.14 (1%)

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the author

Anne Tyler

+ Follow

More books from this author

Redhead by the Side of the Road: A novel

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

VIDEO

Redhead by the Side of the Road: A novel Kindle Edition

by Anne Tyler (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.0 17,394 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

See all formats and editions

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.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

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)

About the Author

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 shortlisted 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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 the other hand, old ladies were his bread and butter, plus this one lived nearby in Homeland. He pressed Talk and said, “Tech Hermit.”

“Mr. Mortimer?”

“Yo.”

“It’s Emily Prescott; remember me? I have a dire emergency.”

“What’s up?”

“Why, I can’t seem to get my computer to go anywhere at all! It just completely refuses! Won’t go to any websites! And yet I still have a Wi-Fi signal!”

“Did you try rebooting?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“Turning it off and then on again, like I showed you?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Sending it for a time-out,’ I like to call that.” She gave a flutter of a laugh. “I did try, yes. It didn’t help.”

“Okay,” he said. “How’s about I come by around eleven.”

“Eleven o’clock?”

“Right.”

“But I wanted to get a present for my granddaughter’s birthday on Wednesday, and I need to order it early enough for the free two-day delivery.”

He stayed quiet.

“Well,” she said. She sighed. “All right: eleven. I’ll be waiting. You remember the address?”

“I remember.”

He hung up and took another bite of toast.

His place was bigger than you might expect, given that it was in the basement. A single long, open space for the living room and the kitchen combined, and then two small, separate bedrooms and a bathroom. The ceiling was a decent height, and the floor was paved with not-too-shabby composition tiles in a streaky ivory color. A beige scatter rug lay in front of the couch. The minimal windows up close to the ceiling didn’t allow much of a view, but he could always tell if the sun was shining—which it was, today—and now that the trees had started to turn he could see a few dry leaves collecting around the roots of the azalea bushes. Later he might take a rake to those.

He finished the last of his coffee and then pushed back his chair and stood up and carried his dishes to the sink. He had a system: he set the dishes to soak while he wiped the table and countertop, put away the butter, ran his stick vacuum under his chair in case he’d dropped any crumbs. His actual vacuuming day was Friday, but he liked to keep on top of things betweentimes.

Monday was floor-mopping day—the kitchen floor and the bathroom. “Zee dreaded moppink,” he said as he ran hot water into a bucket. He often talked to himself as he worked, using one or another foreign accent. Right now it was Ger- man, or maybe Russian. “Zee moppink of zee floors.” He didn’t bother vacuuming the bathroom first, because there was no need; the floor was still pristine from last week. It was Micah’s personal theory that if you actually noticed the difference you made when you cleaned—the coffee table suddenly shiny, the rug suddenly lint-free—it meant you had waited too long to do it.

Micah prided himself on his housekeeping.

When he’d finished mopping he emptied his bucket down the sink in the laundry room. He propped his mop against the water heater. Then he went back into the apartment and tackled the living area, folding the afghan on the couch and tossing out a couple of beer cans and slapping the cushions into shape. His furnishings were sparse—just the couch and the coffee table and an ugly brown vinyl recliner chair. Everything had been here when he moved in; all he’d added was a metal utility shelf for his tech magazines and his manuals. Any other reading he did—mostly mysteries and biographies—he got from the free-book place and gave back when he had finished. Otherwise he’d have had to buy more shelving.

By now the kitchen floor had dried, and he returned to wash the breakfast dishes and wipe them and put them away. (Some might leave them to air-dry, but Micah hated the cluttered appearance of dishes sitting out in a draining rack.) Then he put on his glasses—rimless distance glasses for driving—and grabbed the car topper and his carryall and left through the back door.

His back door was at the rear of the building, at the bot- tom of a flight of concrete steps that led up to the parking lot. He paused after he’d climbed the steps to assess the weather: warmer now than when he had taken his run, and the breeze had died. He’d been right not to bother with his jacket. He clamped the TECH HERMIT sign onto his car and then slid in, started the engine, and raised a hand to Ed Allen, who was plodding toward his pickup with his lunchbox.

When Micah was behind the wheel he liked to pretend he was being evaluated by an all-seeing surveillance system. Traffic God, he called it. Traffic God was operated by a fleet of men in shirtsleeves and green visors who frequently commented to one another on the perfection of Micah’s driving. “Notice how he uses his turn signal even when no one’s behind him,” they would say. Micah always, always used his turn signal. He used it in his own parking lot, even. Accelerating, he dutifully pictured an egg beneath his gas pedal; braking, he glided to an almost undetectable stop. And whenever some other driver decided at the last minute that he needed to switch to Micah’s lane, you could count on Micah to slow down and turn his left palm upward in a courtly after-you gesture. “See that?” the guys at Traffic God would say to one another. “Fellow’s manners are impeccable.”

It eased the tedium some, at least.

He turned onto Tenleydale Road and parked alongside the curb. But just as he was reaching for his carryall, his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and raised his glasses to his forehead so he could check the screen. CASSIA SLADE. That was unusual. Cass was his woman friend (he refused to call anyone in her late thirties a “girlfriend”), but they didn’t usually speak at this hour. She should be at work now, knee-deep in fourth-graders. He punched Talk. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m going to be evicted.”

“What?”

“Evicted from my apartment.” She had a low, steady voice that Micah approved of, but right now there was a telltale tightness to it.

“How can you be evicted?” he asked her. “It isn’t even your place.”

“No, but Nan came by this morning without telling me ahead,” she said. Nan was the actual renter. She lived now with her fiancé in a condo down near the harbor, but she had never given up her claim on the apartment, which Micah could understand even if Cass could not. (You don’t want to seal off all your exits.) “She just rang the doorbell, no warning,” Cass said, “so I didn’t have time to hide the cat.”

“Oh. The cat,” Micah said.

“I was hoping he wouldn’t show himself. I was blocking her view as best I could and hoping she wouldn’t want to come inside, but she said, ‘I just need to pick up my— what is that?’ and she was staring past me at Whiskers who was peeking out from the kitchen doorway big as life when ordinarily, you know Whiskers; he can’t abide a stranger. I tried to tell her I hadn’t planned on having a cat. I explained how I’d just found him in the window well out front. But Nan said, ‘You’re missing the point; you know I’m deathly allergic. One whiff of a room where a cat’s merely passed through a month ago,’ she said, ‘one little hair of a cat, left behind on a rug, and I just—oh, Lord, I can already feel my throat closing up!’ And then she backed out onto the landing and waved me off when I tried to follow. ‘Wait!’ I said, but ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she told me, and you know what that means.”

“No, I don’t know any such thing,” Micah said. “So, she’ll call you up tonight and ream you out and you will apologize and that’s that. Except you’ll have to get rid of Whiskers, I guess.”

“I can’t get rid of Whiskers! He’s just finally feeling at home here.”

Micah thought of Cass as basically a no-nonsense woman, so this cat business always baffled him. “Look,” he told her. “You’re way ahead of yourself. All she’s said so far is she will be in touch.”

“And where would I move to?” Cass asked.

“Nobody’s said a word about moving.”

“Not yet,” she told him.

“Well, wait till she does before you start packing, hear?”

“And it’s not so easy to find a place that allows pets,” Cass said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “What if I end up homeless?”

“Cass. There are hundreds of people with pets, living all over Baltimore. You’ll find another place, trust me.”

There was a silence. He could make out the voices of chil- dren at the other end of the line, but they had a faraway sound. She must be out on the playground; it must be recess time.

“Cass?”

“Well, thanks for listening,” she said abruptly. She clicked off.

He stared at the screen a moment before he slid his glasses back down and tucked his phone away.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07V112LXP
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (April 7, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 7, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2031 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 194 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #80,875 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #115 in City Life Fiction (Books)
- #135 in City Life Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #1,662 in Family Life Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 17,394 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Anne Tyler

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing 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 Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing 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 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

Customer reviews

4 out of 5

17,394 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Venkataraman G

Warm, lighthearted and suffuses the reader with optimism and hope.

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

Lighthearted, warm, subtle and witty, “Redhead By The Side Of The Road” is one of those books towards which one instinctively reaches out in times of despair. It is an antidote to anxiety, an atavistic yet soothing remedy to frayed nerves and an effervescent read that suffuses optimism in the reader. The smile induced by Ms. Tyler’s book will linger long after the covers come down on the 179 pages embedded within their confines.

Micah Mortimer, is forty-four and is a creature of unvarying habit. He is also an animal of processes and procedures. Setting off on a run every morning at seven fifteen, he is also a stickler for cleanliness and rules. He has cleaning and mopping days, ‘kitchen days’ and many other chore days. He also moonlights as the super of the very ordinary looking apartment that he inhabits. For a living he makes house visits helping bewildered people extricate themselves from challenges posed by Information Technology. Operating a one-man company called “Tech Hermit”, Micah is the messiah of modems and wizard of the web as he goes about resolving various issues ranging from the silly to the subtle. For example, he is called in by an Asian man who wants Micah to clean up a cache of porn stored by his son in the depths of hidden folders. Micah is impressed and amused as he pries open the offending documents that are saved under prosaic sounding titles such as “Sorghum Production in the Eastern States, Population Figures, Dayton Ohio…”

Although in a muted and steady relationship with a fourth-grade teacher, Cass Slade, Micah’s tryst with both romance and women, are putting it mildly, sketchy. Women seem to slip away from him a la water off a duck’s back. He just cannot seem to hold a relationship steady. This clockwork pattern of Micah’s life undergoes an abrupt change when he finds a adolescent sulking boy at his doorstep, announced, one evening. Claiming to be the son of one of his ex-girlfriends, Adam Brink has a profound issue in life that requires immediate resolution. Before he can even say cheese, Micah finds himself in the eye of an intricate storm. And when Cass incredulously declares their relationship to be done and dusted, Micah finds himself in an existential crisis.

As things begin to unravel in unimaginable ways, both comical and embarrassing, how Micah goes about tackling them forms the crux and core of Ms. Tyler’s eminently readable book. The former Pulitzer Prize winner is at her vintage best as she produces a perelegans! Hence it does not come as one bit of a surprise that “Redhead By The Side Of The Road” has been nominated for the Booker 2020 long-list. In all probability with its story line sans a single blemish and a catharsis inducing narrative, the book may invariably find a place in the ensuing short list as well.

Even if by some unfortunate contrivance of circumstances and fate, if it is deprived of such a nomination, it will still continue to be read with joy and zest!

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

B. Wilfong

“Once upon a time, more had been expected of him.” (3.5 stars)

Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2023

Verified Purchase

I am an Anne Tyler fan. REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD is a solid book, but it is not among her best.

The plot- Micah Mortimer, a man in his early forties has a decent life, a casual girlfriend, and his routines. However, his routines are what he is most focused on, and thus that is what he values most. The novel is a character study about a man who values the mundane in life because it is routine and regular, and thus dependable. That is an interesting premise.

To really get the point of this text, the reader has to read between the lines. You must note the things implied, not stated, in order to really get what this novel has to say. Ms. Tyler once again shows her understanding and great empathy for some of the most powerful, yet least understood, instincts that we as humans possess.

Quotes:
• “He hated it when something interrupted the normal progression.”
• “But even given a second chance, he wasn’t sure what he’d do differently.”
• “What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”
• “You have to pick yourself up and carry on, is what I say.”

The last chapter is easily the book’s best, and the final line of the text is brilliantly appropriate for this story.
Anne Tyler gets us. Even the parts of us that we can’t begin to articulate about ourselves, and that is why I love her and enjoyed this read.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Dave Schwinghammer

More of a Novelette

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2020

Verified Purchase

Micah Mortimer will remind you of Tony Shaloub's Monk character. He's hyper organized with a day each week set aside to vacuum the rugs, do the laundry etc. He doesn't exactly have OCD, but he's close. He has his own business as an IT specialist. There's a scene where a woman calls him about her grandmother's computers; she can't find the passwords. Micah assures her he can't help her with that, but he goes anyway. Sure enough, he finds them, and she's really grateful.

His four sisters are just the opposite of Micah, messy as all get out with no systems at all. They say Micah takes after their grandfather, a house painter, who had all of his paint cans labeled.

Micah doesn't have a lot of luck with women, but he seems to have found his ideal mate, Cass, a fourth grade teacher, who's close to his age, 40, with a good heart. There's an episode where two boys tell her they don't want to go to the senior citizen's home because they smell bad and try to kiss them. She gives the fourth grade a touching lecture about how these people have lost all the people they loved, including most of their friends. Then she asks who still wants to stay in school on that day. Nobody raises his/her hand. She's a keeper.

Cass is worried about losing her apartment as she's sub-leasing it from this woman who looks like she might get married. Micah is not sympathetic. He even cracks a joke about the possibility of her living in her car. She is not amused.

Then a boy named Brink shows up, claiming Micah is his father. Micah assures him that's impossible as he and his mother never had sex, one of the reasons they split up. Brink has just started college and already he's taking a break. Micah insists he call his mother, and the boy splits.

This is a very short book. The ending snuck up on me. I turned a page, and it was over. The main thread is about Brink's traumatic situation, but the reader wants to know if Micah will ever find the right woman and how he could mistake a fire hydrant for a redhead at the side of the road.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer

Redhead by the side of the road

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2024

Verified Purchase

Interesting and refreshingly unique. The descriptions of the hero and the people surrounding him was well done. Unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence of a person trying to find their way in society today with so little to really hang on to.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Janie U

Simply beautiful and beautifully simple

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2024

Verified Purchase

I've read several Anne Tyler books over the years and try to look out for any new novels. This book had appeared on many recommendation lists so I was keen to read it.
The book was first published in 2020. It has 178 pages split into 8 chapters and uses a fairly large font.
It's a wonderful book in the way that it quickly draws in the reader. I adore Micah and think that most people would be able to empathise with some parts of his world.
The narrative is simply beautiful and beautifully simple - it has a straightforward approach which seems to complement Micah's character so is particularly effective when describing him.
Micah has an extended family who are at odds with his ordered way of thinking. Whilst he does not understand them (nor they him) there is a lovely tolerance and deep love on both sides that come only come from a familial relationship.
There are obstacles that come into Micah's life during the story and they are all dealt with in a calming way that makes this book quite a meditative experience to read.
We are led to believe that Micah isn't happy but then seem to be told that he is content. The result is a wonderful mixture of emotions which is completely familiar to everyone - little around us is exciting or devastating with most of our worlds being vaguely contented with not much changing - and there is some happiness to be found in that.

T. E. Griffiths

A Novel

Reviewed in Germany on May 1, 2023

Verified Purchase

It's a novel by Anne Tyler, what's not to like? I'm not sure Amazon had much to do with it!

Mary Ann

Beautiful Little Gem

Reviewed in Canada on January 10, 2021

Verified Purchase

A small story, beautifully written, funny, real and smart. Anne Tyler is at her best, offering a great read for an otherwise dull, pandemic day.

AJH

EXCELLENT

Reviewed in Spain on March 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

What can one say about Anne Tyler? It is difficult to add to anything that has not already been said. She cerainly cannot be categorised. Never disappoints.

miss bread

Quel ennui!

Reviewed in France on May 9, 2021

Verified Purchase

Déçue par ce roman d une auteure que j apprecie d habitude. En lisant ce livre, je n.ai cessé d attendre que l histoire commence...c est sans doute le but de l auteure qui insiste sur la monotonie, les rituels maniaques et la difficulté à communiquer du héros...le livre en devient ennuyeux. Or une vie de " riens" peut-être passionnante ..ce n est pas le cas ici,les personnages sont peu attachants et les situations peu crédibles...l épisode du" faux fils" est particulièrement irritant...

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

Redhead by the Side of the Road: A novel Kindle Edition

Customers who bought this item also bought

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the author

Anne Tyler

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries