
After college, she went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowaįor nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, writing primarily non-fiction the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She managed to publish her first story in The Paris Review before she graduated. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. The story of Patchett's own family is the basis for her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, about the individual lives of a blended family spanning five decades. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had been long divorced from her mother, served as a Los Angeles police officer for 33 years, and participated in the arrests of both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.

She is perhaps best known for her 2001 novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and brought her nationwide fame.

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. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr.
