‘Ann Patchett just gets better and better ... With more than a nod to Henry James , The Dutch House is quietly devastating, often mysterious and rather beautiful in its effortlessly readable melancholy’ Observer
Longlisted for the Women's Prize 2020
*The Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller and a ‘Book of the Year’ 2019*
Selected as Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Washington Post, Herald and Good Housekeeping
A heart-wrenching new novel of the unbreakable bond between a brother and sister, their childhood home, and a past that will not let them go – from the Number One New York Times bestselling author of Bel Canto and Commonwealth
“'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.”
In the economic boom following the Second World War, Cyril Conroy's real estate investments take his family from poverty to enormous wealth. With it he buys the Dutch House, a lavish mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
Danny Conroy grows up in the opulence of the Dutch House. 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. The siblings grow and change as life plays out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners, in the frames of their oil paintings.
Then one day their father brings home Andrea, a new stepmother. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives: exiled from the house and tossed back into the poverty from which their family rose, Danny and Maeve have only each other to count on.
Told across the decades with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a book for our times; of family, love, loss, and the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives.
_____
Reviews for The Dutch House:
'The book of the autumn … Her finest novel yet’ Sunday Times
‘A wonderful hypnotic masterpiece of a novel. The best book I’ve read in years’ Rosamund Lupton
‘What a spectacular novel. A masterpiece, I’d say’ Cathy Rentzenbrink
‘Indelibly poignant’ Observer
‘One of my top favourite contemporary writers. There isn’t a book of hers that I haven’t put down at the end and been haunted by for weeks after’ Gillian Anderson
‘The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something’ John Boyne
