Winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, Anne Tyler’s tenth novel The Accidental Tourist sets squeaky-clean Macon Leary up against firecracker Muriel Pritchett in this domestic drama of mis-matched manners.

Macon Leary is having a tough time. He’s got a broken leg, a nasty dog, a failing marriage, and a fast-approaching deadline. He’s a travel writer - the circumspect voice behind the Accidental Tourist travel guides for businessmen who want to minimise all sense of the foreign when abroad.

The dog is key. Its increasingly vicious behaviour forces Macon to seek help - and into the story clatters thrift-shop maven and dog trainer Muriel Pritchett: permed hair, deep lipstick, high heels, and manicures. She’s streetwise and tenacious - and she has Macon in her sights. They are opposites. Macon thinks listening to blank cassettes is a brilliant travel idea. Muriel wants romance. Their dialogues are the highlight of the novel.

But it’s not all kitchen sink bubbles. Macon’s marriage disintegrates after a robber shoots his son. Grief tears the marriage apart. On the other side of the train tracks, Muriel, considered the black sheep of her family, lives a hard life with little love and no breaks. With a young son in tow, she cannot afford to fail.

Perceptions of identity are at the centre of the novel: how we can become trapped in other people’s ideas of who we are. Macon’s wife remarks that she knows Macon better than he knows himself, whereas Macon, in the company of the unlikely Muriel, asserts that he is “more myself than I’ve been in my whole life long”.

Macon is the accidental tourist of his own life.

He reflected that he had not taken steps very often in his life, come to think of it. Really never. His marriage, his two jobs … all seemed to have simply befallen him. He couldn’t think of a single major act he had managed of his own accord.

Was it too late now to begin? (349)

Though Macon engages the reader’s sympathy, it is Muriel who steals the scenes. A chatterbox, unexpected and embarrassing, she is the heart of the novel and it is her happiness which is at stake.

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