Excerpt from A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Understandably, therefore, the subject that dominated Christmas that year was Denny's leaving school. (He had decided school was a waste of money, was all he had to say, since he didn't have the least idea what he wanted to do in life. Maybe in a year or two, he said.) His gayness, or his non-gayness, just seemed to get lost in the shuffle.

"I can almost see now why some families pretend they weren't told," Abby said after the holidays.

"Mm-hmm," Red said, poker-faced.

Excerpted from A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. Copyright 2015 by Anne Tyler. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC.