Few novelists create female protagonists as satisfyingly tart as Anne Tyler, now 83 and still among the very best.
Her character Gail is a vintage example: a deputy headmistress passed over for the top job for straight talking about her pupils' abilities rather than sugar coating them, and the kind of woman to be given an etiquette guide by her mother-in-law as a wedding present. (Tyler’s novels tend to inhabit the kind of world where etiquette guides are still a thing.)
That marriage, to the charmingly hapless Max, is long over, but a hesitant reunion may be on the cards at the impending nuptials of Max and Gail’s 33-year-old daughter Debbie, which the emotionally battle-hardened Gail views with unenthusiasm.
Or perhaps not.
Too modest to stand alongside Tyler’s greatest work, Three Days in June nonetheless takes the reader on a painfully pleasurable journey through the accumulated wounds of the human heart.
