The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer
Authors: Anne Tyler,Monica Mcinerney
Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters
, and
Firefly Summer
are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Ballantine eBook Edition
Breathing Lessons
copyright © 1988 by ATM, Inc.
Excerpt from
The Beginner’s Goodbye
copyright © 2012 by Anne Tyler.
The Alphabet Sisters
copyright © 2004 by Monica McInerney
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2005 by Random House, Inc.
Firefly Summer
copyright © 1988 by Maeve Binchy
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Breathing Lessons
and
The Alphabet Sisters
were each published separately by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1990, and 1988.
Firefly Summer
was published by Dell Publishing, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1988.
Cover design: Misa Erder
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54118-5
v3.1
BREATHING LESSONS“Anne Tyler’s gentlest and most charming novel … an honest and lovely book.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Tyler’s best novel yet … with irresistibly funny passages you want to read out loud and poignant insights that illuminate the serious business of sharing lives in an unsettling world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A remarkable book … Tyler centers on that most fascinating of human institutions, marriage, and holds it to the light.”
—Baltimore Sun
“So sharp is Anne Tyler’s eye and so inexhaustible the field of her observation,
Breathing Lessons
shows us a writer who should have had trouble matching herself, surpassing herself.”
—The Washington Post
“Tyler’s touch is gentle but firm.…
Breathing Lessons
fits naturally into the landscape of her work. Some readers may be reminded of
The Big Chill
or even of Frank Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life.”
—
Time
“Tyler’s most entertaining novel yet, a love story in praise of marriage.”
—Library Journal
“With this mature, richly textured work, Tyler just may have created for herself a place among America’s literary treasures.”
—The Houston Post
“A lustrous work … One can’t help but be swept up!”
—Booklist
“A wonderful writer … Each new novel demonstrates the range of Ms. Tyler’s talents.…
Breathing Lessons
has the emotional power of Tyler’s
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“A circuit of comic bumps and heartbreaking plunges.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Simple, wise, funny, touching, and real … Tyler is known for offbeat characters, and Maggie Moran is one of her most endearing.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Tender, subtle … Tyler at [her] height.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“[Tyler] presents us with the human comedy at its most absurd, yet with more warmth than any of her contemporaries.”
—Newsweek
“Humor is woven into almost every sentence.”
—USA Today
“Tyler concentrates on surfaces and everydayness and has the power to render them momentous and magical.”
—New York
“Readers who’ve been following Tyler’s remarkable career will appreciate
Breathing Lessons
for a romance that’s real enough to touch.”
—New York Woman
Breathing Lessons
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by A
TM
, Inc.
Excerpt from The Beginner’s Goodbye copyright © 2012 by Anne Tyler.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
B
ALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1988.
An excerpt from this work was originally published in
The New Yorker
.
Owing to limitations of space, permission acknowledgments can be found on
this page
, which constitute an extension of this copyright page.
This book contains an excerpt from The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler. This excerpt has been set for this edition and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76158-3
v3.1_r2
M
aggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania. Maggie’s girlhood friend had lost her husband. Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore, and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning; so Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also Saturday was his busiest day at work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop. It had needed extensive repairs and Saturday morning at opening time, eight o’clock exactly, was the soonest they could get it back. Ira said maybe they’d just better not go, but Maggie said they had to. She and Serena had been friends forever. Or nearly forever: forty-two years, beginning with Miss Kimmel’s first grade.
They planned to wake up at seven, but Maggie must have set the alarm wrong and so they overslept. They had to dress in a hurry and rush through breakfast, making do with faucet coffee and cold cereal. Then Ira headed off for the store on foot to leave a note for his customers, and Maggie walked to the body shop. She was wearing her best dress—blue and white sprigged, with cape sleeves—and crisp black pumps, on account of the funeral. The pumps were only medium-heeled but slowed her down some anyway; she was more used to crepe
soles. Another problem was that the crotch of her panty hose had somehow slipped to about the middle of her thighs, so she had to take shortened, unnaturally level steps like a chunky little windup toy wheeling along the sidewalk.