Redhead by the Side of the Road

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a sparkling novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection.

Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.

But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a „girlfriend“) tells him she’s facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah’s meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler’s signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation.

Editorial Reviews

THE BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE

„Anne Tyler has every gift a great novelist needs: intent observation, empathy and language both direct and surprising. She has unembarrassed goodness as well.“
–New York Times Book Review

„If ever there was a perfect time for a new Anne Tyler novel, it’s now–and this one doesn’t disappoint . . . Heartwarming and very funny–one of Tyler’s best yet.“
–People

„Delicate and moving . . . Tyler’s voice remains as vital as ever.“
–Vanity Fair

„[A] heartwarming balm for jangled nerves. . . . Tyler’s novels are always worth scooping up.“
–NPR

„Entrancing . . . Tyler is an American Vermeer whose canvases keep opening whole worlds within compact frames. . . . As novelist Marilynne Robinson has observed, realism has been so predominant a literary style ‘that it is easy to forget it is a style.’ One of its flawless practitioners is Anne Tyler, whose fiction maps the sea changes of her characters in carefully calibrated, deceptively understated prose . . . Tyler is a keen-eyed but tenderhearted social observer.“
–O, The Oprah Magazine

„Affecting . . . Tyler has the rare ability to evoke the ordinary with particularity.“
–The New Yorker

„There’s always good reason to celebrate a new Anne Tyler novel. . . . Who else can make words sparkle with humor and tenderness in quite this way? . . . Hilarious and poignant. . . . A master at the small domestic moments that stand in for large and universal truths, Tyler never disappoints. This is a wonderful novel.“
–Boston Globe

„A work that makes you want to live more attentively . . . [Tyler’s characters] are imagined with a curiosity and compassion seldom found in contemporary prose.“
–Financial Times

„Redhead by the Side of the Road is simply a delight . . . Tyler makes her craft look easy again.“
–The Missourian

„Pitch-perfect . . . Tyler is now, as she has long been, at the height of her powers.“
–Washington City Paper

„What a joy it is to open a new novel from Anne Tyler . . . The qualities that have served her and her readers so well are still strong in her fiction–telling details, realistic dialogue and interactions, the rare ability to look at ‘ordinary’ people and find rich depths of humanity that enlighten us all. She presents all this with just the right mix of humor and pathos. It’s no wonder her books ring true to so many people.“
–News & Record (Greensboro, NC)

„Exquisite . . . Tyler’s wit and humanity seem to be as vigorous as ever.“
–Anniston Star (Alabama)

„A fully realised world full of dry humour . . . Each character is deftly drawn in a few lines.“
–The Times (UK)

„Another gem from Anne Tyler . . . Tyler has won so many plaudits over the past 50 odd years that it’s hard to think of new superlatives to add . . . Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here.“
–Observer (UK)

„Delightful . . . Tyler is a magician . . . You finish her novels feeling closer to life, and closer to other people.“
–Mail on Sunday (UK)

„Anne Tyler may, in the end, prove to be one of the most influential novelists of her generation . . . Her books are so irresistibly readable that it’s startling to realise what technical marvels they often are.“
–Daily Telegraph

„Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best. This joyful book is a powerful reminder of how much we need human connection.“
–BookPage (starred)

„Tyler’s warmly comedic, quickly read tale, a perfect stress antidote, will delight her fans and provides an excellent ‘first’ for readers new to this master of subtle and sublime brilliance . . . Perfectly modulated, instantly enmeshing, heartrending, funny, and redemptive.“
–Booklist

„Characteristically tender . . . Suffused with feeling and very moving.“
–Kirkus Reviews (starred)
– From the Publisher

01/13/2020

A fastidious everyman weathers a spate of relationship stresses in this compassionate, perceptive novel from Tyler (Clock Dance). Micah Mortimer, 43, makes house calls for his Tech Hermit business and moonlights as the superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, where the residents observe his regimented routine and wonder, through Tyler’s gossip-inflected narration, „Does he ever stop to consider his life?“ The disruptions begin with a call from his schoolteacher girlfriend, Cassia Slade, who is in a panic because she is facing eviction. Then college freshman Brink Adams shows up on his stoop and claims to be his son. Micah knows it isn’t true, because he never slept with Brink’s mother, Lorna, an old girlfriend, but he tolerates the languid, starry-eyed kid who claims to look up to him for living a working-class life and who fixated on a photo of Micah kept by Lorna. After Micah tries to put Brink in touch with Lorna, he disappears. When Cassia dumps him for not immediately offering to let her move in, Micah descends into a funk that just might push him to prove himself worthy of her companionship. While Micah’s cool indifference occasionally feels like a symptom of Tyler’s spare, detached style, his moments of growth bring satisfaction. This quotidian tale of a late bloomer goes down easy. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management. (Apr.)
– Publishers Weekly

12/01/2019

A self-employed tech expert and superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, Micah Mortimer never, ever looks for a change in routine. But when the woman in his life faces eviction and a teenager shows up on his doorstep claiming to be his son, Micah has got to adjust.
– Library Journal

*2019-12-23
A man straitjacketed in routine blinks when his emotional blinders are removed in Tyler’s characteristically tender and rueful latest (Clock Dance, 2018, etc.).

Micah’s existence is entirely organized to his liking. Each morning he goes for a run at 7:15; starts his work as a freelance tech consultant around 10; and in the afternoons deals with tasks in the apartment building where he is the live-in super. He’s the kind of person, brother-in-law Dave mockingly notes, who has an assigned chore for each day: „vacuuming day…dusting day….Your kitchen has a day all its own“ (Thursday). Dave’s comments are uttered at a hilarious, chaotic family get-together that demonstrates the origins of Micah’s persnickety behavior and offers a welcome note of comedy in what is otherwise quite a sad tale. Micah thinks of himself as a good guy with a good life. It’s something of a shock when the son of his college girlfriend turns up wondering if Micah might be his father (not possible, it’s quickly established), and it’s really a shock when his casual agreement to let 18-year-old Brink crash in his apartment for a night leads Micah’s „woman friend,“ Cass, to break up with him. „There I was, on the verge of losing my apartment,“ she says. „What did you do? Quickly invite the nearest stranger into your spare room.“ Indignant at first, Micah slowly begins to see the pattern that has kept him warily distant from other people, particularly the girlfriends who were only briefly good enough for him. (They were always the ones who left, once they figured it out.) The title flags a lovely metaphor for Micah’s lifelong ability to delude himself about the nature of his relationships. Once he realizes it, agonizing examples of the human connections he has unconsciously avoided are everywhere visible, his loneliness palpable. These chapters are painfully poignant–thank goodness Tyler is too warmhearted an artist not to give her sad-sack hero at least the possibility of a happy ending.

Suffused with feeling and very moving.
– Kirkus Reviews