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´Dazzling . The combination of lightness, warmth and remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming and compulsively readable´ Sunday Times

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´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.

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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

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Ann Patchett is the author of six novels and three works of non-fiction. She has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction three times; with The Magician´s Assistant in 1998, winning the prize with Bel Canto in 2002, and was most recently shortlisted with State of Wonder in 2012. She is also the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and was named one of Time magazine´s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, Karl.

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