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‘Digging to America’

7:00pm, Wednesday 7 May 2008, If you would like to attend the Book Club, or would like further information, please join the Institute of Ideas and contact Geoff Kidder on 020 7269 9224 or email geoffkidder@academyofideas.org.uk

Timandra Harkness introduced Digging to America by Anne Tyler.

Friday August 15th, 1997 - The night the girls arrived, two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun, tenacious Bitsy (with her ‘more organic than thou’ airs, who believes fervently that life can always be improved), two full sets of grandparents and a host of big-boned, confident relatives, taking delivery with characteristic American razzmatazz. Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba (her family ‘only one generation removed from the bazaar’) and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant, elusive Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, the grandmother-to-be, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion. Full of achingly hilarious moments and toe-curling misunderstandings, “Digging to America” is a novel with a deceptively small domestic canvas, and subtly large themes - it’s about belonging and otherness, about insiders and outsiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds. And the end catches you by the throat, ambushes your emotions when you least expect it, as only Tyler can.

Digging to America reviewed on Culture Wars

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