Commonwealth

Name: Commonwealth
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Author: Ann Patchett
ISBN: 9780062491817

by Ann Patchett

4.0

(3 ratings)

279 pages2016HarperCollinsISBN 9780062491817

Fiction

About this book

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the 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, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another. Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories from an award-winning, bestselling author.

Publication Details

Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016
Pages: 279
ISBN: 9780062491817
Language: en

About Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and moved with her family to Nashville, Tennessee at age six. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, during a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. Her second novel, Taft (1994), was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction. Her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and sold over a million copies in the United States. Her memoir, Truth & Beauty, which chronicled her relationship with Lucy Grealy during Grealy's death from cancer, was published in 2004. She was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006.