A Spool of Blue Thread
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
A Spool of Blue Thread
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Kimberly Farr
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By:
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Anne Tyler
About this listen
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 AudiobooksCritic reviews
"She’s changed my perception on life." (Anna Chancellor)
"One of my favourite authors." (Liane Moriarty)
"She spins gold." (Elizabeth Buchan)
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“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread
Beautifully written and full of interesting characters, a study of love in families, with all the misunderstandings, bindings and secrets that individuals carry to build a unit that shifts through time and our very existence.
“Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread
I did not think I was going to like this book, but in the end it seduced me into its rhythm and language and the people that it so gently loves and describes, sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness that made the pages difficult to see.
“But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread
A celebration of what families are and the love we sometimes find so hard to express, made all too evident in the lives of this family Anne Tyler created with so much skill and care for all the delicate memories, that remind us that our memories and of their importance; of how we never want to misplace them because they are the essence of our lives.
Love the reader Kimberly Farr, she presented the story even more vividly than a group of actors could.
eventually you did. Happy endings all around.
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Man-Booker shortlisted - Why?
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Engrossing
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Spool of blue thread
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