From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage - and its consequences, spanning three generations. They seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

She has taken the edgy, imperfect, exasperating moments of marriage and woven a tapestry of life and its changes in the course of a fifty-year relationship. Michael and Pauline first meet in the fervor of patriotism that swept their neighborhoods in the days immediately after Pearl Harbor. They loved, they fought, they made each other miserable, and they married. They continued to fight and make each other miserable and the love was not so easy to see. They had three children and were conflicted by their raising of them. The whole family seems to change when the oldest daughter runs away from home. The pain of that act leaves its indelible mark on all of them and things are never as good as before, though they weren't all that good before.