Macon Leary writes travel guides for people who hate to travel — guides on how to find the familiar in the foreign, how to minimise the discomfort of being elsewhere. After his son is murdered and his wife leaves, he moves back in with his eccentric siblings and their dog. The dog trainer, Muriel Pritchett, enters his life uninvited and changes it. Tyler's most beloved novel.
Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for twenty-eight years. On a single day in 1988 they drive from Baltimore to a friend's funeral in Pennsylvania and back. What happens in the car, at the funeral, at an old friend's house along the way, illuminates the whole shape of their marriage — its compromises, its small deceptions, its persistent stubbornness of love. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize winner.