Featuring Ann Patchett

With Q&A moderated by author Elizabeth McCracken

This event is SOLD OUT! If you’d like to be added to our waiting list, please email Kate.Schwartz@SarasotaLibraryFoundation.org

Our 13th annual Love Our Libraries author luncheon will feature Ann Patchett, a celebrated author, devoted reader, and a champion of literary culture.

The event will be held at The Ora on Friday, February 7, 2025 at 11:30 a.m. It is made possible by Presenting Sponsor, Gulf Coast Community Foundation, and by the generosity of all of our community partners.

About Ann Patchett

Award-winning Author

Ann Patchett is a celebrated author, devoted reader, and a champion of literary culture. She has written thirteen books and has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including England’s Orange Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 2011, when the last of Nashville’s bookstores had been shuttered, Ann declared, “I have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore.” And so, in November of that year she opened Parnassus Books and has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers. In 2012, TIME named Ann one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for her efforts on behalf of the literary community. Writing of her friend on the occasion of that event, novelist Elizabeth Gilbert described Ann as “a woman of wisdom, determination, generosity and courage.”

Learn More About Ann Patchett

Tom Lake

In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

The Dutch House

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past.
The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. Filled with suspense, you may read it quickly to find out what happens, but what happens to Danny and Maeve will stay with you for a very long time.

To learn more about these books and other titles by our guest authors, please visit Bookstore1Sarasota

About Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken laces her work with distinctive humor; in her stories, the fantastical exists side by side with—and reveals the often tragic absurdities of—everyday life.

Elizabeth has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize – her other stories have won three Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize and have been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.