• A Spool of Blue Thread

  • By: Anne Tyler
  • Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
  • Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
  • 3.7 out of 5 stars (29 ratings)

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A Spool of Blue Thread  By  cover art

A Spool of Blue Thread

By: Anne Tyler
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
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Publisher's summary

The Sunday Times best seller

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Fiction prize

A Richard and Judy Book Club pick

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..."

This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.

From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home....

©2015 Anne Tyler (P)2015 Random House Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"She’s changed my perception on life." (Anna Chancellor)
"One of my favourite authors." (Liane Moriarty)
"She spins gold." (Elizabeth Buchan)
"Anne Tyler has no peer." (Anita Shreve)
"My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world." (Nick Hornby)
"A masterly author." (Sebastian Faulks)
"Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good." (John Updike)
"I love Anne Tyler." (Anita Brookner)
"Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour." (Eudora Welty)

What listeners say about A Spool of Blue Thread

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Great!

Ah, Tyler does it again! So satisfying and complete. Heart filled and sweeping extended family drama with unexpected forays and a good ending.

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Superb

A deep and rich evocation of family. Anne Tyler creates yet another wonderful world full of the details that make fiction seem even more vivid than life. A writer at the peak of her imaginative powers sharing with us her wisdom and insight on the frailty and wonder of what it means to belong to the people we are related to.

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