Celestial Navigation

Anne Tyler

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amateur Marriage and Digging to America, comes this unusual and touching novel about two oddly-assorted characters and their intertwined lives.

Jeremy is a child-like, painfully shy bachelor who has never left home. He lives on the third floor of his mother's boarding house and spends his days cutting up coloured paper to make mosaic sculptures - until the day his mother dies and the beautiful Mary Tell arrives to turn his world upside down.

About the Author:
Born in Minneapolis in 1941, Anne Tyler lives in Baltimore where her novels are set. She is the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, The Amateur Marriage and most recently Digging to America.

'A rich, revolutionary novel... she writes with virtuosity and perfect confidence, insight and compassion'

'Tyler has created two characters at once entirely original and entirely convincing...a quiet but immensely strong novel, to admire and treasure.'

Review by Ben Macnair (310115) Rating (8/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Rating 8/10
Anne Tyler's career has seen the talented, prolific writer tell stories about small details in bigger narratives, and Celestial Navigation looks at the small details that form the vast majority of everyday living. It looks at the life and career of Jeremy Pauling, an artist who makes a living from his sculptures made from odds and ends, who lives a settled, quiet life, a puzzle to his mother and both his sisters, but his life changes when his mother dies, and he has to take in a lodger. He has always struggled with human contact, and beautiful women, which Mary Tell, his lodger is. The book looks at their developing relationships, leading to marriage and family life, with their own children, and Mary's children from a previous marriage. Tyler makes a number of stylistic jobs within the course of the novel, with different characters relating events to the reader. This is a fine, well written book which will not disappoint Anne Tyler's existing fans, or any newcomers to her widely varied, quality, and all too human work. There would be a lot for book groups to discuss in this novel, and I would highly recommend it.
Ben Macnair (31st January 2015)