Whistler A Novel

Patchett is even more entrancing, radiant, and heart-seizing than she is in Tom Lake in this tale of complicated marriages, secret love, fear, fury, courage, and reconciliation. - Booklist (starred review)

Like many of Patchett's works, this beautiful and generous novel feels effortless, never straining for effect. It's one of her best. - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling. - Kirkus (starred review)

Patchett is a clarion voice who can persuade any reader to devour her books without pause. Her latest is no exception, with strong characters, compelling circumstances, and the one detail on which lives can pivot to ruin or to happiness. Patchett devises for her characters an incident with edge-of-one's-seat suspense in this novel overflowing with rewards for all. - Library Journal

"A modern family's platonic, later-in-life love story. . . . intimate and entertaining [with a] generous worldview." - Helen Schulman, The New York Times

"This exquisite writer has once again delivered an incandescent work of fiction - sweet, but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love. It's also an ode to New York City itself.... While Patchett has clearly drawn on actual events and individuals to produce this luminous work, she exhibits the expert novelist's knack for following a plot where the imagination takes it.... I didn't want it to end." - Leigh Haber, The Los Angeles Times

"Ann Patchett's new novel is a rare phenomenon in contemporary fiction: a novel both majestic and intimate, original and masterful in its structure, crystalline in its prose, revelatory in its insights, utterly devastating yet ultimately uplifting in its emotional impact. . . . I think it is her best novel yet." - Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

"Ann Patchett's new novel, Whistler, is that loveliest of summer gifts, a story of reconciliation, of old affections renewed, of a family's circumference enlarged. Fans of the author's previous work will open these pages like an old shoebox of family photos. Newcomers - how I envy them those first moments - will discover a writer of gentle wit and quiet grace." - Ron Charles

"Patchett. . . has a penchant for capturing the bittersweet nuances of family and friendship with wit and candor. . . . It's a simple yet soaring tale of love, memory and one extraordinary horse." - Elle

"NPR's reviewer Heller McAlpin [once] observed that [Patchett] 'may well be the most beloved book person in America.' The author...only burnishes that sterling reputation with Whistler, her finely crafted account of a reunion between daughter and stepfather." - NPR

"Patchett's reputation precedes her enough that just seeing her name on the cover means you're in for a moving, captivating work of literature. And Whistler is no different." - E! News

"In her next life, let us hope that Ann Patchett will have the opportunity to read her novels from the perspective of an outsider and have the same awe-inspiring reading experience that we do." - Harvard Crimson