Awards
A New York Times Notable Book.
Synopses & Reviews
John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft -- Fay and Carl's dead father -- and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers...
Review
"As resonant as a blues song....Expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett's fiction." New York Times Book Review
Review
"A moving emblem of fatherhood's rarely explored passion." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Absorbing....Strikingly original." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Patchett writes with remarkable conviction and attention to telling detail. . . . [She] is excellent at portraying the steady love and interest that holds the family members together, even though that love and interest isn't always successful in preserving the members from danger." Jane Smiley
Synopsis
John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft, Fay and Carl's dead father, and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers....
About the Author
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963, the youngest daughter of her nurse mother and police officer father.
While attending Sarah Lawrence College, Patchett took fiction writing classes with Alan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She sold her first story to the Paris Review, where it was published before her graduation. Patchett then went on to attend the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
In 1990, Patchett won a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is there that she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars,which received a James A. Michener/ Copernicus Award for a book in progress. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College.
Patchett's second novel, Taft,was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician's Assistant,was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. In October of the same year, just three days after the official release of The Magician's Assistant,Patchett was awarded the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award.
She has also written for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazineand Gourmet.
Ann Patchett's most recent novel, Bel Canto,won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Patchett currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.