Our novel for February was a Sunday Times bestseller when first published in 1985. A reviewer in one Sunday newspaper said it was “funny, profound and sad, but ultimately reassuring.”
After the loss of his son and the departure of his wife, Macon Leary neatly folds his anguish back into place and adapts the household to more efficient lines. Macon is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. But he’s grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts.
Macon moves in with his equally maladjusted brothers Charles and Porter and his sister Rose, to fight the feeling of loneliness. But it feels to him like a poor solution.
Then he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar, eccentric and vulnerable character who trains dogs for a living at the Meow-Bow dog clinic. She up-ends Macon’s insular world and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.
But with Muriel’s arrival, will Macon’s attempts at ordinary life be tragically (and comically) undone?
The novel was made into a film in 1988 (image above), starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Geena Davis. It won one Oscar and was nominated for three others, in addition to numerous other awards and nominations.
