Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who upends Macon's insular world ? and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life. BITTERSWEET . . . EVOCATIVE . . . It's easy to forget this is the warm lull of fiction; you half-expect to run into her characters at the dry cleaners. . . . Tyler is] a writer of great compassion.? ? The Boston Globe Tyler has given us an endlessly diverting book whose strength gathers gradually to become a genuinely thrilling one.? ? Los Angeles Times A DELIGHT . . . A GRACEFUL COMIC NOVEL ABOUT GETTING THROUGH LIFE.? ? The Wall Street Journal A rarely equaled richness and depth . . . delicious humor . . . Without Anne Tyler, American fiction would be an immeasurably bleaker place.? ? Newsday