Saint Maybe (Random House Large Print) - Hardcover

Tyler, Anne

3.89

17,577 ratings by Goodreads

9780679407713: Saint Maybe (Random House Large Print)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679407715 ISBN 13: 9780679407713

Publisher: Random House Large Print, 1991

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Saint Maybe is the rich and absorbing story of a young man's guilt over his brother's death and his struggle to atone for the wrong he feels he has done.

On a quiet street in Baltimore in 1965, seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe lives with his family in an "ideal, apple-pie household," enjoying the comfort of family traditions and indulging in all the usual dreams of the future. Until one night, when Ian's stinging words to his brother bring tragedy -- and from that careless moment on nothing can ever be the same.

Anne Tyler takes us along Ian's painful and poignant quest for forgiveness, from the Church of the Second Chance to Ian's gratifying, solitary work as a carpenter. Raising the three children that are thrust on him, he finds himself amazed, drowning in family and duty. Then, out of the very heart of the domestic clutter, a light begins to flash.

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Review:

Tyler makes things look so easy that she never gets enough credit, yet she portrays everyday Americans with such humor, grace and, ultimately, emotional force that her books are always deeply satisfying. In Saint Maybe her protagonist Ian Bedloe, stricken with guilt over the death of his older brother, raises three children unrelated to him by blood. He is strengthened in this Herculean task by the storefront Church of the Second Chance, to which he devotes himself with equal fervor. Someone once said all great writers are comic writers. Among living Americans, Tyler is exhibit A.

From the Back Cover:

"Anne Tyler, who is blessedly prolific and graced with an effortless-seeming talent at describing whole rafts of intricately individualized people, might be described as a domestic novelist, one of that great line descending from Jane Austen...Her eye is kindly, wise and versatile (an eye that you would want on your jury if you ever had to stand trial), and after going at each new set of characters with authorial eagerness and an exuberant tumble of details, she tends to arrive at a set of conclusions about them that is a sort of golden mean."

-- Edward Hoagland, The New York Times

"With her extraordinary talents Anne Tyler can crush the heart with the hopelessness of life on one page and lift it with love and humor on the next. Now, in her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, she explores in one Baltimore marriage the resilient spirit that rescues us from moments of despair."

-- Lee Lescaze, The Wall Street Journal

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