'Dazzling . The combination of lightness, warmth and remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times
It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story.
Patchett blends wisdom and humanity jointly with the icy forensic gaze of someone not afraid to expose the frailties of human behaviour ... Read it (Jojo Moyes)
Part of Patchett's design is to curve every type, bend every cliché, adulterate every formula . Subtle, startling and painful ... Commonwealth is one of the most discerning novels about siblings I can recall . Alive with provocative insights that sum up entire relationships (Sarah Churchwell Guardian)
Stunning (India Knight Sunday Times)
Hugely entertaining and an unsettling joy to read (Roddy Doyle Irish Times)
An outstanding novel ... The opening is a show stopper . Patchett is a pleasure to read: there is a no-fuss casualness to the prose that is only possible when a writer is in control of every word and she is master of her art (Observer)
The opening scene .. is a faultless set piece ... Her prose is equally powerful when she's evoking a 1970s summer in Virginia . Patchett deftly summons up a simmering childhood anger and dangerously ricocheting energy (The Times)
Patchett writes excellently and seemingly artlessly (Daily Mail 2016-09-02)
Dazzling . sharply observed, ripe with humour, laden with significance . Her characters shimmer with life-likeness, and she pulls you into every one of her vibrantly drawn scenes with great ease . The combination of lightness, warmth and remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming and compulsively readable (Sunday Times 2016-09-11)
The book flows easily between narrators, constantly switching from past to present, and slowly revealing what happened that summer, allowing Patchett to play with memory and perspective to surprisingly moving effect ... Commonwealth is a book about relationships and the obligations they bring .. Poignant ... funny ... An engaging novel that draws you in with sharp observation, a gin-fuelled plot written in beautiful prose and convincing dialogue. You miss the characters once it's over (Evening Standard)
She achieves the great novel of American domestic life with a spare hand and a demotic prose that seems to come from the mouths of her characters, even when they aren't speaking . Her unshowy account of public and private stories addresses the great puzzle of what our lives are really made of ... This novel convinces me she's wiping the floor with her heftier competitors (Linda Grant Daily Telegraph)
