Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine.

F rom the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author -an irresistible novel exploring the slippery alchemy of attracting opposites, and the struggle to rebuild one’s life after unspeakable tragedy.

Two Weeks – A Novel (Hardcover) R398.00 Add to basket.

Hans Steek die Rubicon Oor (Sagteband, 240 pg) Rudie van Rensburg, reeks 1 R250.00 Add to basket.

The Parisian (paperback) R290.00 Add to basket.

Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.

From a perspective where Macon feels he’s a ‘vast distance from everyone who mattered’ and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have ‘used each other up,’ Macon will find in foreignness his own ‘soft heart.’ Again in Tyler’s tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in ‘another country’ of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon’s pugnacious Welsh corgi who’s fond of treeing bicyclists and family members.

Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with – two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose – in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the ‘impossible’ Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains ‘unchanged,’ who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. How do ‘impossible’ couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a ‘fairly chilly’ man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together ‘for reasons the rest of the world would never guess.’ One can leave the principality of self to tour another’s – to love ‘the surprise of her.the surprise of himself when he was with her.’ Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose ‘concern was how to pretend they had never left home’ – who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel ‘without a jolt.’ Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part.

The accidental tourist novel