Patchett

This year, as usual, except for a Yiyun Li and a Patchett here and an RF Kuang there, I read mostly non fiction – memoirs, political biographies, studies of a filmmaker’s oeuvre, books on women in science, even a passionate treatise on an alternative food source that has led me to include crackling seaweed on my snack menu. Among the memoirs, I particularly enjoyed Sara Rai’s Raw Umber, which touches on growing up in Allahabad, her grandfather Premchand, the ordinariness of death, drawing from a pool of languages in her…

Ann Patchett has once again demonstrated her exceptional writing skills in her ninth novel, which explores the complexities of family dynamics and relationships. Her calm and graceful literary approach draws the reader in without resorting to manipulative techniques. Tom Lake takes us to a cherry farm in America where a mother imparts her life history to her grown-up daughters, revealing the path that led her to her current situation. Cherry orchards near Woods Bay, Montana, USA. (Shutterstock) During the…

Ann Patchett’s fourth novel, the hostage drama Bel Canto, propelled her to literary fame in 2001, winning the Women’s prize for fiction. Two solid novels followed, Run and State of Wonder, but Patchett has produced the best fiction of her career in recent years, with the magnificent family dramas Commonwealth (2016) and The Dutch House (2019), a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. There has been nonfiction, too, with two essay collections, including These Precious Days (2021), the centrepiece of which is a Harper’s magazine…

In This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, an essay from 2011 in which she considers the vicissitudes of contentment, Ann Patchett writes that children have “a real failure of imagination when it comes to thinking of the adults in their lives as having done anything of interest, anything at all, in the time known as before”. Such a state, she suggests, leaves us ill-prepared for the realisation, sharp but inevitable, that our parents, too, may have their secrets. At best, we’re unnerved, something solid now made to seem…

It is 8am in Nashville, Tennessee and novelist Ann Patchett is bursting with sprightly enthusiasm. “I washed my face,” she jokes. We’re barely a couple of minutes into our Zoom conversation and she has given me two “super-hot tips” for forthcoming novels that are going to “win everything” next year – Absolution by Alice McDermott and James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn by Booker-shortlisted Percival Everett – and let slip that Tom Hanks recently popped by for lunch. Her dog, Sparky, star of the weekly YouTube videos…