It is 8am in Nashville, Tennessee and novelist Ann Patchett is bursting with sprightly enthusiasm. “I washed my face,” she jokes. We’re barely a couple of minutes into our Zoom conversation and she has given me two “super-hot tips” for forthcoming novels that are going to “win everything” next year – Absolution by Alice McDermott and James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn by Booker-shortlisted Percival Everett – and let slip that Tom Hanks recently popped by for lunch. Her dog, Sparky, star of the weekly YouTube videos Patchett posts from her independent bookshop, Parnassus Books, sits patiently on the sofa behind her. “I’m a bookseller. That’s what I do,” she says, when I remind her we are supposed to be discussing her own new novel, Tom Lake. “I’m obsessed with other people’s books.”
To say that Patchett is evangelical about books is no mere cliche. In one of her essays, she compares her zeal to that of a Hare Krishna devotee she met many years ago who spent every day proclaiming his love of God to strangers in Chicago airport. “I would stand in an airport to tell people how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.”
