CLOCK DANCE

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college co-ed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together.

And in 2017, she's hoping to start over with her new husband but still feels alienated from her grown children and even from herself. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot, she gets on a plane across the country to Baltimore. The impulsive, seemingly small decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter will lead Willa into uncharted territory surrounded by an eclectic group of neighbors, plunged into the daily rituals that make a community a family, forced to find solace in unexpected places. A bittersweet, probing novel of hope and grief, fulfillment and renewal, CLOCK DANCE gives us Anne Tyler at the height of her powers.

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A Spool of Blue Thread is her twentieth novel. Her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. A member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland.