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Three Complete Novels: A Patchwork Planet / Ladder of Years / Saint Maybe
Three Complete Novels A Patchwork Planet / Ladder of Years / Saint Maybe Author:Anne Tyler In A Patchwork Planet, thirty-year-old Barnaby Gaitlin introduces himself as a "man you can trust," but it doesn't seem certain that Barnaby himself believes his claim. The old people for whom he does household jobs trust him, despite his record as a juvenile housebreaker who snooped in people's scrapbooks and stole le... more »tters tied with satin ribbons. But to his well-off parents, to his ex-wife, and even to his young daugher, Barnaby is a disappointment. When he meets the gentle Sophia, and begins to fall in love, Barnaby can only hope he will find a way to prove he can be trusted.
Delia Grinstead, in Ladder of Years, feels that she is powerless and her life is insignificant. She thinks of herself as "a tiny gnat buzzing on the edges of her family" and believes that her doctor husband only married her to get her doctor father's practice. To her nearly grown children she is barely visible except as a nuisance. Then, while on a family vacation, Delia simply walks off the beach, climbs into the arms of a stranger, and allows herself to be transported into an entirely new life -- one that she hopes to build for herself.
As a teenage, Ian Bedloe, the handsome, easy-going hero of Saint Maybe, imagines that he will be famous someday. When the perfect equanimity of his Baltimore family is shattered by the "accidental" death of his older brother, the seventeen-year-old Ian has reasons for feeling responsible. Then the suicide of Ian's wife leaves three orphan children. One day, Ian, torn by guilt, happens upon the storefront Church of the Second Chance, where he learns that forgiveness can be his. But first he has to do a few simple things -- like building a whole new family.
In these three touching novels, Anne Tyler traces, with flawless style, and timeless insight, the lives of the gentle heroes who draw families together through passages of grief, estrangement, and weakness, and lead them into the light of love and trust.« less