Books Ann Patchett fans can try

MINNEAPOLIS — Look, we get it. Ann Patchett is reliably great. Her books are always best sellers. We know she’s busy running a book store and campaigning against censorship and also that finished novels don’t just appear out of thin air. We’re not asking for her to be as prolific as, say, Mr. Nine-Books-a-Year James Patterson. But it sure would be cool if she produced an annual novel, wouldn’t it?

But as my dad used to say, if wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a happy Christmas. So, instead of wishing we had a new Patchett this year, I decided to recommend other books that seem likely to be enjoyed by a Patchett fan — and last year’s sold-out appearance, at what some say was the most entertaining Talking Volumes event ever, underscores that there are lots of us in the Twin Cities.

To me, Patchett books put recognizable, mistake-prone characters at the forefront, and I think she’d agree, based on a quick chat we had last year in which I rhapsodized about my favorite novel of 2023 and she replied that she didn’t care about any of its characters. The characters weren’t the point of that book but her argument, I think, is that she wants interesting, nuanced humans at the center of the books she reads. And writes.

Patchett’s books are generally contemporary, so you’re not going to be confused into thinking she wrote World War I-era “The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club.” But Helen Simonson’s large, unruly cast of characters wouldn’t feel out of place in a Patchett novel. It’s also a bit Jane Austen-like in the way its men and women struggle to negotiate the rules of a changing world.

Complex family dynamics often are at play in Patchett novels such as “The Dutch House” and “Commonwealth.” That’s also true of Julia Phillips’ “Bear,” in which two sisters in the state of Washington have very different reactions to a wild bear in their neighborhood, reactions that also say a lot about their very different approaches to their tiny family’s fading fortunes. It’s also true of Minneapolis writer V. V. Ganeshananthan’s brilliant “Brotherless Night,” which won this year’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Patchett’s books are always funny, which is why I suspect her fans would like Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s wry “Long Island Compromise,” in which a family reckons with the aftermath of a kidnapping. And, although Patchett doesn’t write thrillers, I think if she did, they might be similar to Liz Moore’s novels, which are sort of thrillers and sort of human, family dramas. (This year’s “The God of the Woods” is great but my fave is “The Unseen World.”)

All of those suggestions are pure speculation, which could well annoy Patchett. But there are also recent books that we know for sure she liked, and that we can reasonably guess her fans will, too. Patchett told her friend, Minneapolis’ Kate DiCamillo, that her newest book, “The Hotel Balzaar” is “magical,” and she’s right.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three 2024 books for which Patchett wrote pre-publication blurbs that ended up making it on the covers of the books, and all three are terrific. Two, in fact, are on my list of my favorite fiction of the year: Niall Williams’ lyrical “The Time of the Child,” a family drama set in small-town Ireland (“I am such a fan of Niall Williams!”) and Simon van Booy’s tender “Sipsworth” (“I loved it!”), the older-woman-befriends-a-mouse storyline of which feels more like Anne Tyler than Ann Patchett. But that’s pretty good company, too.

Patchett’s blurb for Catherine Newman’s “Sandwich” also ended up on the cover of the tragicomedy about three generations of a family (you’re getting this recurring theme, right?) vacationing at an East Coast beach. The book is wry, prickly and observant about a variety of people. Sound like the writing of anyone else you know?

I’m saving for last the news that there sort of is a new Patchett book in stores now, or at least a new/old one. It’s “Bel Canto,” the 2001 National Book Award nominee about terrorists who occupy a party in a South American country. What’s new is that it’s been republished in an edition that retains the original version of the book but that also includes many comments scrawled in the margins by Patchett.

With comments about things that still work for her and many more about sections she wishes she had written differently or deleted, “Bel Canto” is an old book, in that it’s been around for longer than Billie Eilish has. But the experience of reading it, and the trip into Patchett’s head as she interrogates her own writing process, makes reading it again feel like an entirely new experience.