Plano Reads: Clock Dance

Join Second Tuesday Book Club in August for our virtual discussion of Anne Tyler’s recent novel, Clock Dance.

We will meet on Tuesday, August 11, at 7:15 p.m. using Zoom. Register for this session by sending an email to Cathe Spencer or fill out your information on Zoom here. You can join this Zoom book club session via computer or phone.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

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In her early sixties, Willa Drake lives with her second husband in Arizona, and spends her time sorting her hairbands by color, as we see in the opening scene of this charming novel. Then a startling phone call offers her a chance to make a dramatic change in her life. Confronted by an emergency, and asked to help Cheryl, Denise and Airplane, none of whom she has ever met, Willa boards a plane to Baltimore and enters an entirely different world. Clock Dance reveals what happens to her there, as only the gifted and observant Anne Tyler can tell her story.

Booklist (2018): “Tyler’s bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humor, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal.”

Publisher’s Weekly (2018): “Pulitzer winner Tyler (following A Spool of Blue Thread) takes a bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another… It’s a stellar addition to Tyler’s prodigious catalogue.”

Anne Tyler is considered one of the best writers at work in the United States today. She has written twenty-three novels, most set in Baltimore, where she has lived for decades. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, and she has been nominated for the U. K.’s Booker Prize, most recently this year, for her new novel Redhead by the Side of the Road.

She is respected for her perfectly developed characters, her careful study of marriage and family life, and her “style without a style,” described by fellow author Cathleen Schine as “natural, measured and delicate,” enabling her readers to relax into her gently wry novels.

Anne Tyler has never done book tours, and is not on social media, but you can read and listen to a rare interview (with Scott Simon of NPR) that she gave for Clock Dance, at this link.

Be sure to register for this session by sending an email to Cathe Spencer or fill out your information on Zoom here.