The Dutch House: Nominated for the Women's Prize 2020
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’Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature’ Guardian
Nominated for the Women’s Prize 2020
A STORY OF TWO SIBLINGS, THEIR CHILDHOOD HOME, AND A PAST THAT THEY CAN’T LET GO.
Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.
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.
’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
A masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice, and the power of place
Winner of the Orange Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award, Ann Patchett is one of American contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed and beloved writers
Patchett’s most recent novel Commonwealth has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK and export, and was chosen as a book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday and New York Times
Funny, heartbreaking and wise, The Dutch House confirms Ann Patchett’s position as a novelist of family life without rival: a masterful map of the strange territories that lie between men and women, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives
The Dutch House has already been selected by the Bookseller as one of their ‘Ten Not to Miss’ alongside Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood and has been chosen as NetGalley’s September Book of the Month
Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature
Her finest novel yet
A wonderful hypnotic masterpiece of a novel. The best book I’ve read in years
Bliss
The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something
What a spectacular novel. A masterpiece, I’d say
A gloriously immersive family saga about lost inheritance
One of my top favourite contemporary writers. I don’t think that there’s a book of hers that I haven’t put down at the end and been haunted by for weeks after
The vicissitudes of life in a step-family unfold over five decades … A moving portrait of an unusual house and the unhappy family living in it
A rare book, the kind you ration, one that grabs you by the heart and brain and pulls you right in
The Dutch House is a novel that assures Patchett, alongside John Irving and Anne Tyler, a place as one of the foremost chroniclers of the burdens of emotional inventory and its central place in American lives
Indelibly poignant in its long unspooling perspective on family life, The Dutch House brilliantly captures how time undoes all certainties
An intimate and transporting novel … The Dutch House is a novel brimming with pain and tenderness in which Patchett’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display … A searching, exquisitely wrenching novel about family, sacrifice and obsession
One of the most celebrated novelists of our times … But it is her new book, widely billed a one of this autumn’s best new reads, where she truly comes into her own
A family story full of love and pain and insight
Impeccably fine … A thoughtful, quietly profound book
The Dutch House offers … A simultaneous awareness of human fragility and human resilience
As always, Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life, rather than literature
She uses her signature blend of wry humour, rage and regret in a tale of siblings who cannot escape the shadow of their childhood home
Masterly
An outstanding novel, wryly funny, heart-breakingly sad and entirely engrossing
We’re calling it now: The Dutch House will be the book of the autumn ... Her finest novel yet
Few novelists today combine such a forensic eye with an acute and humane understanding of human nature. I would read Ann Patchett’s shopping list
Patchett is a master at pacing and detail … The question of what makes a home pervades this gripping book
She rivals Tyler for emotional acuity
Ann Patchett writes novels that quietly and thoroughly devastate the reader – in a good way. Her new novel is no exception
Patchett well deserves her reputation for compelling novels, and The Dutch House is her most enthralling yet
Wise and funny and unwraps the complexities of human beings with heartbreaking tenderness. I love this book
If there’s a better, more poignant or involving novel than The Dutch House published this year, I will be very, very surprised
A dark modern fairy tale, a delicately woven portrait of a family in flux
The plot is gentle but firm while Patchett’s prose dazzles with detail and nuance, spinning a story that tucks itself inside your heart
Wonderfully astute ... Patchett’s books … have a sly comic undertow
A marvellously romantic and evocative novel about the nostalgic pull of a lost home … Beautifully written and often tender … That rare thing: a novel which reveals greater riches on a second reading
Beautifully imagined … Patchett has excelled herself to produce one of the most moving and engaging novels this year
Engrossing … A captivating family saga about injustice and forgiveness
Gothic and slyly comic, it’s full of smart observations about sibling power struggles
- Title: The Dutch House: Nominated for the Women's Prize 2020
- Author: Ann Patchett
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781526614940, 9781526614971, 1526614979, 1526614944
- Resource ID: LLS:9781526614940
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T11:52:59Z
Ann Patchett is the author of seven 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.