Bel Canto

Name: Bel Canto
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
Author: Ann Patchett
ISBN: 9780061738883

by Ann Patchett

4.0

(1 ratings)

356 pages2009Harper CollinsISBN 9780061738883

Fiction

About this book

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening-until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers. “Patchett doing what she does best. . . . What gives this novel its power is Patchett’s flair for sketching the subtleties of her characters’ behavior.”-New York Times Book Review Freshman Common Book: NYU/Steinhardt School, Converse College, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Publication Details

Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009
Pages: 356
ISBN: 9780061738883
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.