Celestial Navigation

Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His only company is his elderly mother, who lives beneath him.

But after the death of his mother and at a loss, Jeremy agrees to accept the mysterious yet compassionate Mary Tell and her child as new tenants. Like one of his paper creations, Jeremy is fragile and easily torn, and Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to even look her in the eye.
Over time, Mary pushes Jeremy to explore beyond the boundaries of his cloistered existence, even if that includes the wonderful and terrifying adventure of falling in love.

“Anne Tyler is steadily raising a body of fiction of major dimensions.”—The New York Times