Anne Tyler tames Shakespeare's novel Shrew

Last fall Hogarth Press published the first in a series of novels by contemporary writers re-imagining Shakespeare's plays on the 400th anniversary of his death. So far we've had Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold and Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name, an interpretation of The Merchant of Venice.

Now Anne Tyler has written a charming and witty adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, moving it to Baltimore, where many of her novels are set, and dialing down Shakespeare's brutal depiction of the war between the sexes.

The Vinegar Girl of the title is Kate Battista, an unaffected, intelligent, headstrong beauty living at home with her dad, Louis, an eccentric scientist at Johns Hopkins, and a ditzy younger sister, Bunny, who, like her namesake Bianca, is pretty and popular with the boys.