Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler

Tyler's plot explores the ways ordinary people react to disastrous events with quietly heroic behaviour. When seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe confronts his older brother Danny with his belief that the latter's wife, Lucy, is having an affair, Danny drives into a wall in an apparent suicide. Shortly after, Lucy dies of an overdose of sleeping pills, and responsibility for the care of the deceased couple's three children (two from their mother's previous marriage) falls to their grandparents. A profoundly guilty Ian, who has discovered his accusations were wrong, receives spiritual guidance from Reverend Emmett of the storefront Church of the Second Chance, and he decides to drop out of college to become a carpenter and help his ailing parents with the children, until he eventually becomes their primary caretaker, sacrificing his own freedom to fulfil what he perceives to be a lifelong moral obligation.

ISBN: 000000021906

Pages: 337

Trade paperback

QPD, 1991

Fair condition

B23