The Amateur Marriage: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy and dignity…[She] gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton’s marriage.”

  — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• “This ‘wickedly good’ author has come to represent the best of today’s American literature…She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday…Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric.”

  — Observer (London)

• “Her command of what will move a story forward and engross a reader is faultless.”

  — Baltimore Sun

• “She expertly explores the perils of marriage…Wise and observant…She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love.”

  — Miami Herald

• “Unlike many writers treading similar ground, Tyler does not sneer at such domestic heartache, nor does she infuse it with gothic doom. Instead, she depicts Michael and Pauline’s marriage with simple realism.”

  — Philadelphia Inquirer

• “Tyler straddles expertly the line between commercial and literary fiction, so that her characters and their circumstances appeal for the widest possible audience. She has keen sense of both humor and pathos, and when to employ the right one in the right measure. Her characters are thoroughly three-dimensional. They are our own families; they are ourselves; and it is our own desperate desire to understand the people we love, as well as the people who hurt us and whom we hurt, that keeps us reading with fervor.”

  — Boston Globe

• “A rich and satisfying addition to the author’s distinguished body of work.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “Tyler is an unsurpassed commentator on the subtle entanglements of relationships.”

  — Harper’s Bazaar

• “With piercing psychology, gentle humor, and poignant understanding of how deeply people who can love each other hurt each other, Ms. Tyler sets her story against quick evocative sketches of the decades as they pass…At the top of her craft, not a jot pretentious, she continues to write about real people with real problems in language anyone can understand.”

  — Richmond Times-Dispatch

• “It is Tyler’s particular genius to capture life at its most mundane, then redeem it with a poignant humanity; to reveal the callousness of her characters, then peel back the layers to where the feelings lurk…Tyler has once again shown us our limits, along with our capacity for transcending them.”

  — St. Petersburg Times

• “A wonderful character study illustrating the problems that, to some degree, afflict every marriage…Tyler’s genuine story appears seamless as it progresses over a period of sixty years. The author possesses that rare ability to capture the essence of human disappointment, and combines disparate characters with an ordinary subject, propelling it with wry humor and impassioned feelings.”

  — Desert Morning News

• “Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class’ Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn’t share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed…The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler’s immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “So smart, so sensitive, so readable and engaging.”

  — Kirkus Reviews