Search results for ""Author Ann Patchett""

From the New York Times bestselling duo of award-winning author Ann Patchett and Fancy Nancy illustrator Robin Preiss Glasser comes an empathetic story about introverts and extroverts, and two siblings who learn to be themselves.The Vert family is celebrating a very special occasion: it’s Ivan’s birthday! And Estie knows that every birthday needs a great party, with lots of guests, party hats, and twinkling tin foil stars. Because that is what everyone wants on their birthday, right? But did Estie ever ask Ivan? From the New York Times bestselling duo of Escape Goat and Lambslide, award-winning author Ann Patchett and Fancy Nancy artist Robin Preiss Glasser, comes a heartfelt story about honoring our differences.

Read more less

'So compellingly personal you feel you’re looking over her shoulder as she sits down to write' New York Times 'Electrically entertaining ... Funny, generous, spirited and kind' The Times This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is an irresistible blend of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, the gradual loss of her beloved grandmother, starting her own bookshop in Nashville, her love for her very special dog and, of course, her eventual happy marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a memoir both wide ranging and deeply personal, overflowing with close observation and emotional wisdom, told with wit, honesty and irresistible warmth.

Read more less

Winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The poignant – and at times very funny – novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Dutch House and Commonwealth. Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honour of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerised the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening – until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Read more less

Winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The poignant – and at times very funny – novel from the author of The Dutch House and Commonwealth. Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honour of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerised the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening – until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Read more less

Next, dive into TOM LAKE – the breath-taking new novel from Ann Patchett 'Dazzling … life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times 'Patchett blends wisdom and humanity jointly with the icy forensic gaze of someone not afraid to expose the frailties of human behaviour ... Read it' Jojo Moyes 'An outstanding novel ... a master of her art' Observer It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story…

Read more less

The first novel from the bestselling author of The Dutch House, Commonwealth and Bel Canto, Winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award. It is 1968. Rose Clinton arrives at St Elizabeth’s, a Roman Catholic home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky. Rose has fled her dull but loving husband without telling him she is pregnant and has decided to be ‘a liar for the rest of my life’. As penance, she has also abandoned her widowed and much loved mother, with no mention of her condition. Rose plans to give her baby up because she knows she cannot be the mother it needs. But St. Elizabeth’s is home to a healing spring, and when Rose's time draws near, she realises that she cannot go through with her plans. Nor can she remain untouched by those she has left behind; by the ever-watchful Sister Evangeline; by the love of Son, the handyman at St. Elizabeth; or later by the birth of her daughter Cecilia. Enchantingly graceful, Ann Patchett’s first novel is about sanctuary and pilgrimage, pain and healing and the helping hand of chance.

Read more less

The breathtaking new novel from Ann Patchett a Sunday Times and No. 1 New York Times bestseller* WATERSTONES FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH JUNE 2024 ** SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 ** A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK ** A 2023 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES *Filled with the moments I live for in a story' BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry[Tom Lake] has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships' REESE WITHERSPOONOne of the most beloved authors of her generation' SUNDAY TIMESThere''s more to every love story than what we choose to tell...It's spring and Lara's three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they've always longed to hear of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance,

Read more less

Dive into Tom Lake - the breathtaking new novel from Ann Patchett * THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * * SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 * * A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK * * A 2023 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES * ‘Filled with the moments I live for in a story’ BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry ‘[Tom Lake] has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships’ REESE WITHERSPOON ‘One of the most beloved authors of her generation’ SUNDAY TIMES This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end. It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they’ve always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. ‘One of our greatest living chroniclers of love and marriage … Expect wonder; Patchett always delivers’ ELLE

Read more less

Dive into Tom Lake - the breathtaking new novel from Ann Patchett * THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * * SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 * * A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK * * A 2023 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES * ‘Filled with the moments I live for in a story’ BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry ‘[Tom Lake] has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships’ REESE WITHERSPOON ‘One of the most beloved authors of her generation’ SUNDAY TIMES This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end. It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they’ve always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. ‘One of our greatest living chroniclers of love and marriage … Expect wonder; Patchett always delivers’ ELLE

Read more less

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER An unforgettably powerful new novel of the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go – from the Number One New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto 'The book of the autumn. The American author of Commonwealth (brilliant) and Bel Canto (even better) releases perhaps her finest novel yet’ - Sunday Times ‘The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something’ – John Boyne “'Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?’ I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer.” Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings. Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives. The siblings are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother’s: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale and story of a paradise lost; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives.

Read more less

“Exquisite. . .Commonwealth is impossible to put down.” — New York Times#1 New York Times Bestseller NBCC Award Finalist New York Times Best Book of the Year USA Today Best Book TIME Magazine Top 10 Selection Oprah Favorite Book New York Magazine Best Book of The Year The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives.One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.Spanning five decades, Common

Read more less

An irresistible collection of essays and memoir from the internationally bestselling, Women’s Prize-winning author of The Dutch House 'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: essays that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Ranging from the personal – her portrait of the three men she called her fathers; unexpectedly falling into a life-changing friendship with Tom Hanks; how to answer when someone asks why you don’t have children – to the sublime – exploring the Harvard Museum of Natural History before its doors open; the unexpected influence of Snoopy; the importance of knitting – each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew. Illuminating, penetrating, funny and generous, These Precious Days is joyful time spent in the company of one of our greatest living authors.

Read more less

The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.  The elegance of Patchett’s prose is seductive and inviting: with Patchett as a guide, readers will really get to grips with the power of struggles, failures, and triumphs alike. —Publisher''s Weekly“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patche

Read more less

From the bestselling author of The Dutch House, Commonwealth and Bel Canto, Winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award. When Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college they began a friendship that would define their lives. Lucy Grealy lost part of her jaw to childhood cancer, and a large part of her life to chemotherapy and endless reconstructive surgeries. Stoic but vulnerable, damaged by bullying but fascinated by fame, Lucy had an incandescent personality that illuminated those around her. In this tender, brutal book, Ann Patchett describes Lucy’s life and her own platonic love for her. Truth & Beauty is the story of the part of their lives that they shared – the camaraderie and comedy, the tribulations and tragedy of true friendship. A portrait of unwavering commitment through success, failure, despair and drugs, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined.

Read more less

Next, dive into TOM LAKE – the breath-taking newest novel from Ann Patchett Lose yourself in the story of a lifetime – the unforgettable Sunday Times bestseller ‘Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature’ Guardian Nominated for the Women’s Prize 2020 A STORY OF TWO SIBLINGS, THEIR CHILDHOOD HOME, AND A PAST THAT THEY CAN’T LET GO. Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside. In the economic boom following the Second World War, Cyril Conroy's real estate investments take his family from poverty to enormous wealth. With it he buys the Dutch House, a lavish mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Danny Conroy grows up in the opulence of the Dutch House. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. The siblings grow and change as life plays out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners, in the frames of their oil paintings. Then one day their father brings home Andrea, a new stepmother. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives: exiled from the house and tossed back into the poverty from which their family rose, Danny and Maeve have only each other to count on. ‘The best book I’ve read in years’ Rosamund Lupton ‘Her finest novel yet’ Sunday Times ‘The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something’ John Boyne ‘A masterpiece’ Cathy Rentzenbrink ‘Bliss’ Nigella Lawson

Read more less

Next, dive into TOM LAKE – the breath-taking new novel from Ann Patchett 'Dazzling … life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times 'Patchett blends wisdom and humanity jointly with the icy forensic gaze of someone not afraid to expose the frailties of human behaviour ... Read it' Jojo Moyes 'An outstanding novel ... a master of her art' Observer It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story…

Read more less

New York Times Bestseller  A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick  A New York Times Book Review Notable Book  TIME Magazine''s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and BuzzfeedAnn Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of

Read more less

Ann Patchett’s second novel to be published in the UK, following the Orange Prize-shortlisted ‘The Magician’s Assistant’. John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. When his son is taken away to Miami by his mother, Nickel is left with nothing but Muddy’s, the Memphis blues bar that he manages. Then he hires Fay Taft, a young white waitress from east Tennessee who has a volatile brother, Carl, in tow. They spell nothing but trouble for Nickel. Fay stirs up both romantic and paternal impulses in him and Carl is clearly a no-good. But Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft, Fay and Carl’s dead father, and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met but whose place he has taken.

Read more less

‘Enthralling' Observer ‘A spectacular read' Sunday Express 'An award-winning writer at the top of her game' Telegraph A moving story of overlapping lives from the Orange Prize-winning author of Bel Canto Tip and Teddy are becoming men under the very eyes of their adoptive father, Bernard Doyle. A student at Harvard, Tip is happiest in a lab, whilst Teddy thinks he has found his calling in the Church, and both are increasingly strained by their father's protective plans for them. But when they are involved in an accident on an icy road, the Doyles are forced to confront certain truths about their lives, how the death of Doyle's wife Bernadette has affected the family, and an anonymous figure who is always watching...

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION There were people on the banks of the river. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns. Now Marina Singh, Anders' colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders's wife, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend's steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest. What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and susurrating grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination. Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough. ________________________________ 'The best book I have read all year. It made me laugh and weep and left me in a state of wonder: perfect from first page to last ... a masterpiece' EMMA DONOGHUE 'A triumph ... Pachett's best book yet' GUARDIAN

Read more less