French Braid
ANNE TYLER
(CHATTO & WINDUS, 256 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

The significance of the title of Anne Tyler’s latest family saga is not revealed until near the end. A French braid is a complicated hairstyle involving two skeins which are tightly plaited together high on the head, leaving crimps and curls long after the plaits are untied: “That’s how families work,” says Anne Tyler. “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free: the ripples are crimped in forever.”

Located largely in Baltimore – the setting for so much of Tyler’s writing – the novel tells the story of an apparently dysfunctional family, visited at roughly 10-year intervals from 1959. Each section is told from a different person’s perspective, with each character’s world conveyed through Tyler’s usual attention to detail – the gruesome tinned meals of the ’50s, the grim lakeside vacation on which Robin the dad talks endlessly to his neighbour, while standing waist-deep in water, failing to notice his non-swimming son almost drowning. That inability to see what is really going on is a hallmark of this wonderful novel: each person treasures the outward forms of family life while refusing to accept the truth that everyone is separate.