Name: The Dutch House
Rating: 4.00796178343949 (314 reviews)
ISBN: 9781526614957

From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.

The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

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.