Which character from a book has stayed with you the longest?

Readers—in person, on social media and in the blogging world—often ask which book has moved me the most. Many have over the years, but there's one that has stayed with me since I read it in my late teens—Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler.

It wasn't the novel so much as one character: Ezra Tull. I really felt for him.

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In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), Ezra Tull is one of three siblings—the others being his elder brother Cody and sister Jenny—raised by their mother, Pearl, after their father, Beck, abandons the family. Set in Baltimore, the novel explores family relationships and sibling rivalry, touching on love, jealousy, and a longing for acceptance. As adults, Cody, needy, embittered and competitive, turns to business; Ezra, the quiet and compassionate sibling, eventually runs the restaurant that gives the novel its title; and, Jenny seeks out her own career path but struggles to find emotional fulfilment.

At the heart of it all is the restaurant itself, where Ezra cooks what people are homesick for, even as he longs for the perfect family he never had. There is something about his sense of decency and capacity for hope that has stayed with me. He is generous to those around him, yet somehow doesn't find the happiness he seeks—and deserves. I thought there was something deeply human about his character.

Maybe that's why, decades after reading the novel, I still think of him from time to time.

Have you read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant? If yes, what did you think of the novel and Ezra Tull?