way "back when they were grownups") and is now a divorced physics professor working at the same nearby college that they had both attended. While Rebecca is touched by certain remembrances and traits of Will, her fantasy of re-kindling their old affections is spoiled by his sad, staid and inflexible demeanor. Rebecca eventually realizes that the path that she chose (or chose her) decades ago may have resulted in her "right person" after all. Reviews Beth Kephart: "Back When We Were Grownups is Tyler's fifteenth novel, and she is still not scrimping on wackiness and wit, on sentences of shocking originality, on wisdom. ...There's not a flat line in this book, not a single simple character, not a moment that isn't tapped for all its glorious possibilities. There is a party on almost every page, and there is also the party's aftermath. This is storytelling at its best and most breathtaking. Tyler, an acknowledged master of the form, is living up to her well-earned reputation. "With Davitch, Tyler has created a character who is brave enough to look back on her life and to imagine herself making different kinds of choices. Brave enough to wonder what honesty looks like, whether there is ever really a single distillation of self that is unshakable and true....Anne Tyler has a talent for spinning out characters we care about, characters who go on living long after their stories end. Publishers Weekly: "Tyler...has a gift for creating endearing characters, but readers should find Rebecca particularly appealing, for despite the blows she takes, she bravely keeps on trying. Tyler also has a gift...for unfurling intricate stories effortlessly, as if by whimsy or accident. The ease of her storytelling here is breathtaking, but almost unnoticeable because, rather like Rebecca, Tyler never calls attention to what she does. Late in the novel, Rebecca observes that her younger self had wanted to believe "that there were grander motivations in history than mere family and friends, mere domestic happenstance." Tyler makes it plain: nothing could be more grand." Tom Shone: "But then that's the thing about Anne Tyler novels: your certainty about how things are going to turn out in no way interferes with your desire to see them do so. Tyler's plots are the mere stuff of family albums, really—a procession of marriages, births, deaths. And yet her feel for character is so keen that even…readers who….would happily fry