Each month we choose a newly released book that we feel is perfect for a book club. Then we roadtest it. We read the book (and encourage you to read along with us), and at the end of the month, we’ll share our thoughts about its potential for book clubbers, and also our own book club discussions about the book.

Our pick for February is Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread.

If you’re also planning to read A Spool of Blue Thread this month, we’d love to hear from you. Email [email protected] for more information.

What’s the opening line? Late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whitshank had a phone call from their son Denny. They were getting ready for bed at the time. Abby was standing at the bureau in her slip, drawing hairpins one by one from her scattery sand-colored topknot. Red, a dark, gaunt man in striped pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, had just sat down on the edge of the bed to take his socks off; so when the phone rang on the nightstand near him, we was the one who answered. “Whitshank residence,” he said.

What is the book about? Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.

Who wrote it? Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A Spool of Blue Thread is her twentieth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Why we picked it? Several of our staff are already devoted Anne Tyler fans who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the book, and other members of our staff had never read her but always wanted to. Tyler’s work also typically raises a host of issues around family, identity and marriage that provides perfect fodder for book club discussions. And… the timing felt perfect as Tyler has suggested that A Spool of Blue Thread will be her last book.