From the ragtime era at the end of the 19th century to the years of change in the mid-1970s, it is about growing up and breaking away, rebellion and acceptance.

It is a haunting, human story that will live in your heart forever..."[2] "When Duncan marries his cousin Justine, hitherto an ardent Peck, she begins to discover her own thirst for adventure.

Justine is pulled both forward and back: an amateur teller of fortunes who advises her clients always to go along with change, she remains in thrall to her own childhood.

"[3] In his 1976 review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, “Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design…This writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good.”[4] Katha Pollitt praised: "Less perfectly realized than Celestial Navigation, her extraordinarily moving and beautiful last novel,Searching for Caleb is Tyler’s sunniest, most expansive book.

While etching with a fine, sharp wit the narrow-mindedness and pettishness of the Pecks, she lavishes on them a tenderness that lifts them above satire….Reading “Searching for Caleb,” one is constantly being startled by…gestures, words, wrinkles of thought and feeling that are at once revelatory and exactly right.