Celestial Navigation, Anne Tyler
Celestial Navigation, Anne Tyler
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Celestial Navigation

Author: Anne Tyler

Narrator: Amy Finegan, Julie Rogers, Francine Brody, Tara Ward, Barbara Barnes

Unabridged: 9 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 01/01/2021


Synopsis

Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His only company is his elderly mother, who lives beneath him.

But after the death of his mother and at a loss, Jeremy agrees to accept the mysterious yet compassionate Mary Tell and her child as new tenants. Like one of his paper creations, Jeremy is fragile and easily torn, and Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to even look her in the eye.

Over time, Mary pushes Jeremy to explore beyond the boundaries of his cloistered existence, even if that includes the wonderful and terrifying adventure of falling in love.

“Anne Tyler is steadily raising a body of fiction of major dimensions.”—The New York Times

Author Bio

Anne Tyler, an American novelist, is also an author of short stories and is a literary critic. She has had 22 novels published, being cited in literary publications as creating fully developed characters and commended for her accurate attention to detail. Some of her more well-known novels are: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, and A Spool of Blue Thread. She has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austin, and Eudora Welty.

Tyler was born in Minneapolis Minnesota, as the oldest of four children to a chemist Dad and a social worker Mother. They were Quakers who lived in a series of Quaker communes, one being formed by conscientious objectors, as Anne was age 7 through 11. Her practical, hands on education was supplemented by correspondence school. Her first short stories, she told to herself under the covers at 3 years of age, to try to get sleepy. Her favorite book was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, and had a profound influence on her ability to show "how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same". Her early perception of changes over time appear and reappear in Tyler's novels, just as her favorite book, The Little House, appears in her first novel.

Tyler considered herself to be an outsider in public schools, but also attributed that same feeling as having been a valuable asset in her writing success. Her other credit is given to a former high school English teacher, Phillis Peacock. Seven years after high school, Tyler dedicated her first published novel to "Mrs. Peacock, for everything you've done".

Tyler has won many literary awards including a Pulitzer. She remains closely associated with the city of Baltimore, Maryland, her home since 1967, and is the location used in many of her books. Her husband died in 1997, and their two daughters have gone on to careers in the arts.

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