Au printemps 2020, les trois filles de Lara retournent au verger familial dans le Nord du Michigan. Tout en cueillant des cerises, elles supplient leur mère de leur raconter l'histoire de Peter Duke, un célèbre acteur avec lequel elle a partagé à la fois la scène et une idylle l'été de ses vingt-quatre ans. Tandis que Lara se remémore le passé, ses filles examinent leur propre vie et leur relation avec leur mère, et sont amenées à reconsidérer le monde et tout ce qu'elles croyaient savoir. Empreint d'espoir, élégiaque, le neuvième roman d'Ann Patchett est une méditation sur l'amour - conjugal, de jeunesse - et les vies que les parents ont menées avant la naissance de leurs enfants.
Danny et Maeve, un frère et une soeur unis par un amour indéfectible, ne cessent de revenir devant leur ancienne demeure se heurter aux vitres d'un passé douloureux. Cette imposante Maison hollandaise, écrin des joies et des peines de leur enfance, source de leurs malheurs, les attire comme un aimant. À travers le destin de ces deux quasi-orphelins, Ann Patchett, en déchiffreuse éclairée de l'âme humaine, signe un roman pénétrant sur l'abandon, le pardon, les liens filiaux et le rapport que chacun d'entre nous entretient avec le passé.
Pour échapper, le temps d'un dimanche, à sa propre famille, Albert s'incruste au baptême de Franny, la fille d'un vague collègue, et succombe à la beauté renversante de sa mère, Beverly. Quelques années plus tard, Albert et Beverly se marient. Chaque été, leurs enfants se retrouvent tous chez eux, en Virginie, formant une petite tribu avide de liberté, prête à tout pour tromper l'ennui. Mais un drame fait voler en éclats le rythme et les liens de cette fratrie recomposée. Un roman somptueux qui accompagne sur cinq décennies des personnages lumineux, extraordinairement attachants.
Scientifique et chercheuse pour une entreprise pharmaceutique du Minnesota, le Dr Marina Singh est envoyée au Brésil sur les traces de son ancien mentor, le Dr Annick Swenson. Celle-ci semble avoir totalement disparu dans la jungle amazonienne alors qu'elle travaillait sur un nouveau médicament d'une extrême importance (une pilule qui allongerait la fertilité de plusieurs années)... Variation moderne sur «Au coeur des ténèbres» de Conrad, «Anatomie de la stupeur» est un roman sombre et magnifique, où la beauté de l'inattendu côtoie l'abîme de la perte.
THIS SUMMER, DIVE INTO TOM LAKE - THE BREATH-TAKING NEW NOVEL FROM ANN PATCHETT THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * THE NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK ''A new Ann Patchett novel is always cause for celebration ... and Tom Lake is one of her best'' i ''This comforting summer read has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships'' REESE WITHERSPOON ''Filled with the moments I live for in a story'' BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry ''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 ----------------------------- Praise for The Dutch House:
''Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature'' Guardian ''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 The Dutch House was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller w/e 28.09.19
Un soir de neige de 2006, Tip, un jeune Noir de 20 ans, fils adoptif de l'ancien maire de Boston, est violemment poussé à terre. Lorsqu'il relève la tête, il comprend que la femme qui gît près de lui, renversée par une voiture, lui a sauvé la vie. Ce qu'il ne sait pas, c'est que cette femme, qui va naviguer toute la nuit, le temps du roman, entre la vie et la mort, a veillé sur lui, de loin, depuis son plus jeune âge. Avec «Dans la course», Ann Patchett signe un grand roman sur la famille.
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.
Dazzling . The combination of lightness, warmth and remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times 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.
'It is remarkable for me to remember now that I thought it would be possible to walk away from her, that she might have gone on living, but without me. I know now I never would have had the strength of my convictions. I am living in a world without Lucy. I have no choice about that. If she were alive and I had that choice, I wouldn't have been able to last without her for a day.'
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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2012 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, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, 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 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.
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.
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.>
The poignant -- and at times very funny -- novel from the author of 'The Magician's Assistant', winner of the Orange Prize, repackaged and promoted as part of Perennial's fiction promotion in 2008.
The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays. "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 suprising 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 Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks'' short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman--Tom''s brilliant assistant Sooki--with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer''s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. From the enchantments of Kate di Camilo''s children''s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz''s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author''s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark--and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
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.
