A Spool of Blue Thread
ABOUT
THE BOOK
It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…’
This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.
From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century – four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home…
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
A story that just unwinds and unwinds, poignant, human, realistic and delightful.
Tyler’s novel of the Whitshank family is beautifully crafted with insight and humour. An unsentimental look at an ordinary family, but with hidden complexities, over a period of four generations. Tyler’s characters seem as real as your own neighbours and so it is easy to welcome them into your life and to remember them once the novel is finished.