Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who upends Macon’s insular world—and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.

“Bittersweet… Evocative… It’s easy to forget this is the warm lull of fiction; you half-expect to run into her characters at the dry cleaners.… Tyler [is] a writer of great compassion.” —The Boston Globe

“Tyler has given us an endlessly diverting book whose strength gathers gradually to become a genuinely thrilling one.” —Los Angeles Times

“A delight… A graceful comic novel about getting through life.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A rarely equaled richness and depth…delicious humor… Without Anne Tyler, American fiction would be an immeasurably bleaker place.” —Newsday