Editor-in-Chief at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (exc. Canada) to The Dutch House, the new novel by the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one bestselling author Ann Patchett, from Dan Kirshen at ICM Partners. The Dutch Housewill be published in the UK on 24th September 2019. It will be published by HarperCollins in the US.
Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, inheritance 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. Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania. 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. Their childhood is played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings. Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Andrea’s advent to the Dutch House will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for half a century. As decades pass, 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. 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.
Alexandra Pringle said: ‘I found it hard to imagine how any book could rival Commonwealth; but The Dutch House is Ann Patchett’s masterpiece. Unlike most masterpieces, however, it’s wise, human and funny as well as dazzlingly discerning and forensic. She is a novelist of family life without rival, mapping the strange territories that lie between men and women, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives with a virtuosic deftness; it is also the most moving account of the shadows cast by absent mothers you will ever read. I can’t wait for the world to meet Danny and Maeve Conroy – the sort of characters you think about with a love usually reserved for only your oldest friends.’