Henry Carter Hull

From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, who has been forced to retire at sixty-one, coming to terms with the final phase of his life.

Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn’t bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything...

Jean Gilkyson, pregnant when her husband was killed, is raising their daughter, Griff, in an Iowa trailer house with yet another brutal boyfriend, when she realizes this can't go on. But the only refuge available is a town in Wyoming where her loved ones are dead and her father-in-law wishes she was too. For a decade he has blamed her for his son's death, choosing to go on living himself largely because his oldest friend otherwise couldn't survive....

After a heart attack, Duane Moore returns to Thalia, Texas, where he encounters and is charmed by K. K. Slater, an heiress who has opened a ranch for endangered black rhinoceros, but the return of Honor Carmichael hinders Duane's romantic endeavors.

Recently widowed businessman Duane Moore tries to return to his old life in Thalia in West Texas after an impromptu trip to Egypt, but can't seem to adjust to the many changes he finds there, until he meets a young geologist, Annie Cameron, whom his son has hired to work out of the Thalia office.

Gus Bailey, a high-society journalist, becomes involved in a slander suit after trusting in an unreliable source pertaining to powerful congressman Kyle Cramden's involvement in the disappearance of a young woman, and as he tries to write a novel about the suspicious death of a billionaire, he finds that the widow of the deceased, Perla, is trying to suppress the truth.

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"Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner-phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor-has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals...