Awards
2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2002 Orange Prize
Finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award
Synopses & Reviews
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. 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 breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots.Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.
Review
"There are quite a few improbable aspects to Bel Canto, but the handful of times when I found my head popping above the surface of Patchett's novel to catch a quick lungful of realism is it really possible that among a group of 57 assorted men there wouldn't be one opera hater or homosexual? I was promptly sucked back under the surface by the book's bewitching undertow. This is a story of passionate, doomed love; of the glory of art; of the triumph of our shared humanity over the forces that divide us, and a couple of other unbearably cheesy themes, and yet Patchett makes it work, completely." Laura Miller, Salon.com (click here to read the entire Salon.com review)
About the Author
Ann Patchett is the author of three previous novels,
The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year;
Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; and
The Magician's Assistant, which earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. She is also a recipient of the
Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award. Patchett has written for many publications, including
New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, GQ, Elle, Gourmet, and
Vogue. Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she took writing classes with Alan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. While an undergraduate, she sold her first story to the Paris Review. Patchett then went on to attend the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in 1990, she won a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Here she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was awarded a James A. Michner/Copernicus Award for a book in progress. The Patron Saint of Liars was adapted into a TV movie for CBS in 1997, and Patchett wrote the screenplay for Taft, which has been optioned by Morgan Freeman for a feature film.
She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.