NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Clock Dance comes the story of four generations unfolding in and around the lovingly worn house that has always been the Whitshank family's anchor. • MAN BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE “Absorbing and deeply satisfying.” —Entertainment Weekly "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon ...” This is how Abby Whitshank always describes the day she fell in love with Red in July 1959. From Red’s parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, the Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part of the picture: Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets.

A Spool of Blue Thread isn't a book full of fireworks or crazy plot surprises, but NUBClub liked its soft and slow charm. As a generation novel about the Whitshank family and the domestic bonds and struggles, the novel paints a true picture of how children disappoint parents, how young people become old, and the compromises and trials of marriage. The plot's center -- the death of Red and the slow degeneration of Abby leads to the fissures in the family coming to heads, but not in explosive ways. Instead, Tyler shows us characters who get by in life, and the small victories and failures that mark their time. The conflicts between the loyal 'son' Stem and the malcontent Denny take the form of the resentment and jealousies that you would expect from real people, and it's the very fact that they don't explode that gives the novel its strength. This quiet story tells gives Tyler space to paint very pretty pictures of the characters and the house itself, an object of care, desire, and disappointment around which the whole book hangs. And the ending, in which the progenitors of the family are revealed to have a marriage just as complex and negotiated as any of the grandchildren, is simply perfect. Overall, we enjoyed Tyler's family drama, not as our favorite novel of all time, but as a smart and well-written family drama.