I love the way Anne Tyler tells stories. I’ve just been back through what I’ve written about the previous eleven books of hers I’ve read over the last eighteen years and I don’t think there has been one I didn’t adore.

This book starts with a section featuring Willa as an eleven year old in the 1960s, then we next get to see her as a twenty-one year old in the 1970s. Fast forward twenty years for another glance at her life, and finally it’s 2017 and we see her still looking for purpose in her life at sixty-one. (I think the dates are right but I don’t have the book to hand to check any more.) I really like the time jumps. You can see Willa is the same person in each different time but life has pushed her around and she hasn’t necessarily got what she wanted. Things she was unsure about at one time are settled in later times. It makes you see how life forks on you. You take one of the paths in front of you but could easily have picked another. As a reader I really wanted Willa to pick different paths in one of the times, but she didn’t, and it’s entirely realistic that she didn’t, but many years later you see the echoes of what could have been still ringing in her life.

And it’s only while writing this that I realised that this is exactly what the Clock Dance is. Time speeding on and taking you where it likes, but can you make it take you where you want to be?