The Amateur Marriage

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II fervour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counter-culture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, we watch their lives unspool and see the consequences of their very mismatched marriage. ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE 'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, A Spool of Blue Thread, Redhead by the Side of the Road and Three Days in June. She has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction and was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'.