“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
If you’re looking to dive into the works of Ann Patchett, you may be wondering where to begin. Renowned for her elegant prose and unforgettable characters, Patchett has written a wide range of novels, memoirs, and essays that have captivated readers across the world. Whether you’re new to her writing or simply want to revisit her stories in the right order, we here at What We Reading are on hand to run you through the best Ann Patchett books in order. From her early works to her recent bestsellers, we’ve put together an Ann Patchett book list that highlights her most beloved novels and shows you our recommended reading order. So, if you’re on the hunt for the top Ann Patchett novels to start with or a complete overview of her most acclaimed titles, this list will help you decide which story to pick up first.
The Dutch House (2019)
First up on our list of the best Ann Patchett books is perhaps her finest and most popular work to date, The Dutch House. Danny Conroy grew up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania. Though his father is distant and his mother absent, Danny has his beloved sister, Maeve. Life is comfortable and coherent until one day, when their father brings Andrea home. Whilst they don’t know it yet, Andrea’s arrival sows the seed of the defining loss of both Danny and Maeve’s lives.
Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the remainder of their lives. Danny and his sister are drawn back time and time again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. Delivered with Patchett’s inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility, and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time, and the lives of those who survive us.
Check Out The Best Books Like The Dutch House
Tom Lake (2023)
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters returned to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before. As Lara recalls her past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationships with their mother, and are forced to wrestle with the world and everything they thought they knew.
Ann Patchett’s novel, 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 as the world falls apart. As with all her other novels, Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics, resulting in a rich and luminous story told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety.
Bel Canto (2001)
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 take the entire party hostage.
But what starts out as a panicked, life-threatening scenario soon 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 even lovers.
State Of Wonder (2011)
In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, State of Wonder presents a stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional resonance and moral complexity. As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle.
Charged with finding her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to contend with her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys through the unforgiving heart of darkness. Stirring and luminous, State of Wonder is one of the best Ann Patchett books, where beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest’s jewelled canopy.
Commonwealth (2016)
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins arrives at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverley, setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the four parents and six children involved.
When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they have for one another. Told with humour and heartbreak, Commonwealth is an Ann Patchett novel about inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories.
Check Out The Best Books Like Commonwealth
The Patron Saint Of Liars (1992)
Ann Patchett’s debut and still one of her most beloved books, The Patron Saint of Liars opens at St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky, a place that usually on harbours its residents for a short while. Not so for Rose Clinton, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed, and stays.
She plans to give up her child, thinking that she cannot be the mother it needs. But when Cecilia is born, Rose makes a place for herself and her daughter amid St. Elizabeth’s extended family of nuns and an ever-changing collection of pregnant teenage girls. Rose’s past won’t be kept away, though, even by St. Elizabeth’s; she cannot remain untouched by what she has left behind, even as she cannot change who she has become in the leaving.
Run (2007)
2007’s Run shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from one another, and how family can include people you’ve never met before.
Since their mother’s death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants nothing more than to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an arrangement in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children – all his children – safe.
These Precious Days: Essays (2021)
At the heart of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship. When Patchett chose an early galley of Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read before bed one night, she had no idea that this single choice would be life-changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman, with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.
Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create moving pieces that are both a self-portrait and a landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich with insights. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal in this deeply personal collection of essays that reflect on everything from home, family, friendships, and writing, providing us readers with the ability to see the world anew, and reminding us of how fleeting and enigmatic life can be.
This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage (2013)
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett examines her deepest commitments to create a resonant portrait of a life in her work, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. This work takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, as well as the unexpected thrills of opening a bookshop.
As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.
The Magician’s Assistant (1997)
Sabine – twenty years a magician’s assistant to her handsome, charming husband – is suddenly a widow. In the wake of his death, she finds he has left her a final trick: a false identity and a family allegedly lost in a tragic accident but now revealed to be very much alive and well.
Named as heirs in his will, they enter Sabine’s life and set her on an adventure of unravelling his secrets, from sunny Los Angeles to the windswept plains of Nebraska, that will work its own sort of magic on her.
Truth & Beauty (2004)
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries.
In Truth & Beauty, the story isn’t about Lucy’s life or Ann’s life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest to surgical wards to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined – and what happens when one is left behind.
What Now? (2008)
Based on her lauded commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, this stirring essay by Ann Patchett offers hope and inspiration for anyone who has found themselves at a crossroads, whether it be graduating, changing careers, or transitioning from one life stage to another. With wit and candour, Patchett tells her own story of attending college, graduating, and struggling with the inevitable question of What now?
From student to line cook to teacher to waitress and eventually to award-winning author, Patchett’s own life has taken many twists and turns that make her exploration genuine and resonant. One of the most empowering Ann Patchett novels, What Now celebrates the excitement of our futures, the possibilities of the unknown, and reminds us that there is as much joy in the journey as there is in reaching the destination.
Taft (1994)
John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he’s left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow.
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 his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers…
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
