Book of a lifetime: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

From The Independent archive: Marika Cobbold is in awe of Anne Tyler’s quietly stunning, quirky and oh-so humane writing in ‘The Accidental Tourist’

Author Anne Tyler, left, and the front cover of her novel The Accidental Tourist, right (Michael Lionstar / Penguin Random House)

Asking a book lover to choose her book of a lifetime is a little like asking Casanova to pick his love of a lifetime; but if I have to, that book must be The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler.

A friend’s mother recommended it to me back in the Eighties. We were sitting on the veranda while the slow sun set over the dark blue North Sea and I was bemoaning the lack of “my kind of books”. By this, I meant books that combined the best qualities of literary and commercial fiction the way the classics do; books where the writer’s voice and view of the world delights and surprises, where the story and the characters seduce you along from page to page.

Mrs von Sydow handed me a copy of The Accidental Tourist and I embarked on a lifelong love affair with the quietly stunning, quirky and oh-so-humane writing of Anne Tyler. Like all of Tyler’s novels, The Accidental Tourist combines comedy and tragedy without veering into farce or sentimentality. It’s a novel that runs deep and showcases her ability to make the everyday both entirely recognisable and extraordinary.