Anne Tyler: A New Collection: The Accidental Tourist/Breathing Lessons/Searching for Caleb (Very good, 1991, HC, 696 pages, Wings Books)

Used in very good condition: Cover and pages have very light wear. ISBN 0517064596

Set in Baltimore, Maryland, The Accidental Tourist revolves around Macon Leary, a writer of travel guides whose son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant. He and his wife, Sarah, separately lost in grief, find their marriage disintegrating until she eventually moves out. When he becomes incapacitated due to a fall involving his disturbed dog and one of his crazy inventions, Macon returns to the family home to stay with his eccentric siblings, sister Rose and brothers Porter and Charles, whose odd habits include alphabetizing the groceries in the kitchen cabinets and ignoring the ringing telephone.

Breathing Lessons describes the joys and pains of the ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran as they travel from Baltimore to attend a funeral and back home again in one day. It also examines Maggie's attempts to reconcile her son and daughter-in-law. During the journey to the funeral, we learn how both Ira and Maggie have forgone their youthful dreams and feel they have settled for an "ordinary life." We experience how they exasperate each other—Maggie too talkative, too meddling; Ira too logical, uncommunicative, and too judgmental. A few detours during their 90-mile drive reveal Ira and Maggie's "incompatibilities, disappointments, unmet expectations—and lasting love".

In Searching for Caleb, Duncan Peck has a fascination for randomness and is always taking his family on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots...to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one...