Nicole Abadie

I always find her fiction very comfortable and just her characters so warmhearted and alluring.

I just can't put them down.

When we meet Cass, she seems like the wrong person for Micah, I thought, because she seems completely unlike him in terms of she doesn't exist in the same confines.

She seems more outgoing and a little bit more... I don't know if the right word is alive, but certainly more willing to put herself out there than Micah is.

And she seems to be Micah's little glimpse into how, I suppose, normal people, if that's...

a phrase I suppose you can use, people who don't live such sheltered existences.

It's interesting because I think Anne Tyler has been writing about Baltimore and families for, I think, more than 50 years now.

And as Anne Tyler has continued writing and has written more and more books, I feel like a lot of the books have become shorter and more concise.

I mean, Redhead by the Side of the Road is possibly long enough just to be a novella even.

And I think that she sort of mastered the ability to say a lot with very few words, like we were saying earlier.

When you meet Micah's family, you get so much from just these little tidbits of conversation.

I feel like this is Redhead by the side of the road is Anne Tyler at her peak.

It might not be my number one, but I certainly think it's in the top five or six Anne Tylers that I've read, for sure.

No.

No, I think it's spot on.

I think such as the immensity of Sally Rooney, I think any young Irish writer is inevitably going to be compared to her, especially when you're a young Irish writer talking about millennials, I suppose, and writing a millennial romance, as it's been termed in some corners.

I think she encapsulates what a lot of sort of millennial men and women are going through.

I guess millennials is the term, in terms of she's a person who's moved from Ireland to Hong Kong and basically just trying to figure out what to do with her life.

She's got a sort of poorly paid job as an English teacher and sort of just trying to find, struggling to find her place in life.

She's a young woman...