Reading Order
The Dutch House Reading Order
Ann Patchett's The Dutch House (2019) is a National Book Award finalist and bestselling novel told by Danny Conroy about the house his father bought for his mother in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, in 1946 — a house so magnificent and strange that it defined and destroyed the Conroy family, expelled them one by one, and continued to haunt them for decades after they were gone from it.
Where to start
The Dutch House
Complete The Dutch House Book List
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The Dutch House
Ann Patchett·2019·Patchett's most widely read novel — emotionally powerful, beautifully constructed, and immediately accessible. Start here. - Buy
Bel Canto
OptionalAnn Patchett·2001·Patchett's career-defining novel — an opera singer held hostage with a group of diplomats in an unnamed South American country, who gradually creates an unlikely community with her captors. Often recommended alongside The Dutch House as her best work. - Buy
Commonwealth
OptionalAnn Patchett·2016·A multigenerational novel following a blended family across fifty years — the emotional and structural predecessor to The Dutch House.
The Dutch House — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Dutch House about?
The Dutch House tells the story of Danny and Maeve Conroy over five decades, from their childhood in the Dutch House (a 1922 Flemish mansion their real-estate developer father Cyril Conroy bought in 1946, to the confusion and eventual abandonment of their mother) through young adulthood, when their father's second wife Andrea evicts them from the house after their father's death, and into middle age, when Danny and Maeve still compulsively drive to the Dutch House and park outside it, narrating their shared childhood to each other and to themselves. The novel is a story about siblings, about the houses that shape families, about the stories we tell about our childhoods that may or may not be accurate, and about the way the past can hold us in place — the Dutch House as a symbol of loss, longing, and the impossibility of return.
Why does Patchett use a male narrator for The Dutch House?
Patchett has said in interviews that she chose a male narrator partly because the emotional and psychological damage done to Danny by the Dutch House situation is easier to see than the damage done to Maeve — Maeve is more obviously heroic, more emotionally competent, the sister who holds things together — and she wanted the narrator to be the sibling who is more oblivious to what has actually happened. Danny is the person who needs the Dutch House to be decoded for him; Maeve, who sees everything clearly, would have made a different and arguably less interesting narrator. The choice also allows Patchett to explore the way men can be shaped by forces they only partially understand, and the way women — Maeve, their lost mother, Andrea the stepmother — are more often the active agents in the novel's drama.
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