There's also a house and all the events are linked to this house. Of course it revolves around a family, Patchett's signature. The story was so well woven, mysterious, dramatic and engaging. You see the girl on cover and think 'who is she?, is she the one in the Dutch house? Is she Dutch, is it set in Netherlands?' All these questions spark, not even opening the first page of the book. The design and the title of the book is even brilliant. She's the queen of contemporary family dramas, and the Dutch House didn't disappoint. I'm a fan of the author, and I'm happy to say this book is stunning inside out. Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility and sacrifice of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us.Īnn Patchett at her best! I loved this book, it was great. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother’s self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives.įor all that the world is open to him, for all that he can accumulate, for all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past.

Though they cannot know it, Andrea’s advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives. Then one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair.

Life is comfortable and coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings, or under the cover of the draperies around the window seat in Maeve’s room. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.Ī masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice, and the power of place.ĭanny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father.

We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.

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