The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler is a 355-page hardcover published in 1985 by Alfred A. Knopf. The dust jacket and book are in good original condition.
The time is now. The place is the Baltimore Anne Tyler has made her own. Her protagonist is Macon Leary, and he is the prototype of the "accidental tourist." He hates travel. Which is why he is so singularly equipped to make his living as the anonymous author of a series of chunky, passport-size guidebooks called Accidental Tourist in..., whose logo is a comfortable armchair with wings, and whose ideal reader is the businessman abroad who longs for a king-size Beautyrest in Madrid, a taste of Sweet'n'Low in Tokyo, and a restaurant in Rome that will serve Chef Boyardee.
Macon is someone who himself travels through life accidentally. Things just happen to him--he doesn't seek them out. His only child has been killed in a senseless accident; his wife for no apparent reason asks for a separation, leaving him to fend for himself; a broken leg conveniently thrusts him back home with his sister and brothers in the family home where he started out. Surely it is an accident that he gets involved with the astonishing Muriel, the frizzy-haired, stiletto-heeled, nonstop talker who does the bookings at the kennels where Macon boards his unmanageable Welsh corgi, Edward, when he has to go on one of his fact-finding trips.
But gradually what seems like accident is tinged with purpose, and the comfortably familiar is disturbed by the impulse toward escape.
