PATCHETT, Ann. Bel Canto. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2013.

Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. [Pagination to be confirmed.] Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Ann Patchett (b. 1963) grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and published her first novel in 1992. Bel Canto, her fourth, was the book that brought her to the widest possible audience: it won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was included in the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century. Patchett is also, since 2011, the co-founder and co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, one of the most celebrated independent bookshops in the United States.

The novel was inspired by the Japanese embassy hostage crisis of 1996–97, in which members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took seventy-two hostages at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, during a holiday party. The crisis lasted 126 days and ended with a military assault. Patchett transposed the events to an unnamed country and transformed their meaning entirely: what she was interested in was not the politics or the violence but the strange suspended world created when captors and captives are forced to inhabit the same space for months at a time and the expected roles begin to dissolve.

The novel opens on the birthday party of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese industrialist, at the home of a South American vice president. The entertainment is provided by Roxanne Coss, the world's greatest living soprano, whose presence Hosokawa has insisted upon. The evening is perfect until a band of young guerrillas takes the entire gathering hostage. What follows, over the months of captivity, is a gradual transformation in which the certainties that structure ordinary life — nationality, class, the distinction between captor and captive — give way to something more human and more contingent. People who cannot speak each other's languages learn to communicate; people who have no reason to love each other fall in love; the music that Roxanne Coss continues to sing becomes the medium through which the enclosed community discovers what it actually values. Patchett's achievement was to write this process without sentimentality, with a clear understanding that what is being described is beautiful and temporary and destined for a violent end.

Bel Canto is an inspiring tale of transcendent romance that has been adapted into a 2018 film directed by Paul Weitz, starring Julianne Moore as Roxanne Coss and Ken Watanabe as Mr. Hosokawa. 

Near fine. Some small markings to lower edge gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000517