Bloomsbury to publish Patchett's 'masterpiece' in September

Bloomsbury has bought another novel from Ann Patchett, The Dutch House, billed as the award-winning author's "masterpiece" about family, betrayal and love.

The publisher’s editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada to the new novel by the Orange Prize-winning author Ann Patchett, from Dan Kirshen at ICM Partners.

The Dutch House will be published in the UK on 24th September 2019. It will be published by HarperCollins in the US.

“Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, inheritance and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetise and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us,” Bloomsbury said.

The book follows Danny Conroy who grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania, the synopsis reads. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Their childhood is 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 sparking “a banishment whose reverberations will echo for half a century”.

Pringle said: “I found it hard to imagine how any book could rival Commonwealth but The Dutch House is Ann Patchett’s masterpiece. Unlike most masterpieces, however, it’s wise, human and funny as well as dazzlingly discerning and forensic. She is a novelist of family life without rival, mapping the strange territories that lie between men and women, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives with a virtuosic deftness; it is also the most moving account of the shadows cast by absent mothers you will ever read.

“I can’t wait for the world to meet Danny and Maeve Conroy – the sort of characters you think about with a love usually reserved for only your oldest friends.”

Patchett is the author of six novels is the author of six novels and three books of non-fiction whose most recent novel Commonwealth (Bloomsbury) was published in 2016.  She has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction three times; with The Magician's Assistant (4th Estate) in 1998, winning the prize with Bel Canto (4th Estate) in 2002, and was most recently shortlisted with State of Wonder (Bloomsbury) in 2012. 

She also runs a an independent bookshop, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, Tennessee.