Born in Los Angeles in 1963 and long settled in Nashville, where she co-founded the independent bookshop Parnassus Books, Ann Patchett writes the kind of novel that seems perfectly calm on the surface and turns out, on reflection, to have rearranged something in the reader.
Her breakthrough, Bel Canto, took a hostage crisis in an unnamed South American country and made of it a novel about opera, translation and the strange intimacies of captivity; it won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002. The books since have moved closer to home without losing that formal poise: State of Wonder, Commonwealth, The Dutch House, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Tom Lake. Family, chance and the long consequences of a single decision are her recurring subjects, handled in prose so unshowy that its precision can take a while to register. She is also, through the shop and through her essays, one of the most persuasive advocates for independent bookselling in America.
10 hours and 43 minutes
