Anne Maeve Binchy Snell was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, columnist, and speaker. Her novels were characterised by a sympathetic and often humorous portrayal of small-town life in Ireland, and surprise endings. Her novels, which were translated into 37 languages, sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Her death at age 73, announced by Vincent Browne on Irish television late on 30 July 2012, was mourned as the death of one of Ireland's best-loved and most recognisable writers.
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano known for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s.
Donald Patrick Conroy was an American author who wrote several acclaimed novels and memoirs; his books The Water is Wide, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini were made into films, the last two being nominated for Oscars. He is recognized as a leading figure of late-20th-century Southern literature.
Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been widely critically-acclaimed, and her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been adapted into a film.
Cleo Virginia Andrews, better known as V. C. Andrews or Virginia C. Andrews, was an American novelist.
The Little Friend is the second novel by the American author, Donna Tartt. The novel was initially published by Alfred A. Knopf on October 22, 2002, a decade after her first novel, The Secret History.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), and The Dutch House (2019). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Italian for Beginners is a 2000 Danish romantic comedy film written and directed by Lone Scherfig, and starring Anders W. Berthelsen, Lars Kaalund and Peter Gantzler, together with Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Anette Støvelbæk and Sara Indrio Jensen. The film was made by the austere principles of the Dogme 95 movement, including the use of handheld video cameras and natural lighting, and is known as Dogme XII. However, in contrast to most Dogme films which are harsh and serious in tone, Italian for Beginners is a light-hearted comedy. It was made on a $600,000 budget, and went on to gross over 27 times that.
Bel Canto is the fourth novel by American author Ann Patchett, published in 2001 by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It was placed on several top book lists, including Amazon's Best Books of the Year (2001). It was also adapted into an opera in 2015.
She-Devil is a 1989 American black comedy film directed by Susan Seidelman and written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns. It stars Meryl Streep, Roseanne Barr and Ed Begley Jr. A loose adaptation of the 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by British writer Fay Weldon, She-Devil tells the story of Ruth Patchett, a dumpy, overweight housewife, who exacts devilish revenge after her philandering husband leaves her and their children for glamorous, best-selling romance novelist Mary Fisher.
Light a Penny Candle is a 1982 novel by the Irish author Maeve Binchy. Her debut novel, it follows the friendship between an English girl and an Irish girl over the course of three decades, beginning with the English girl's stay in Ireland during the Blitz. It is one of Binchy's best-known novels.
Tara Road is a 2005 film directed by Gillies MacKinnon. It is based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Maeve Binchy.
Run is a 2007 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It was her first novel after the widely successful Bel Canto (2001).
A World to Win is a novel written by Jack Conroy and published in 1935. It was republished in 2000. This novel, which is set before and during the Great Depression, follows two brothers through their lives both together and separately. One brother, Leo, represents the life of a working man, while the other, Robert, shows the life of a writer, a struggle that Conroy himself dealt with. Despite Robert being determined to be the brother who becomes famous for his writing, he does not. In fact Leo, who never seemed to have a plan, becomes "famous" first when he becomes a wanted man. Although the brothers have led very different lives, they end up together in the end when Robert decides to do something unplanned and free his brother from the police.
State of Wonder is a 2011 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It is the story of pharmacologist Marina Singh, who journeys to Brazil to bring back information about seemingly miraculous drug research being conducted there by her former teacher, Dr. Annick Swenson. The book was published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and by Harper in the United States. It was critically well received, and was nominated for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, among other nominations.
The Goldfinch is a novel by the American author Donna Tartt. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other honors. Published in 2013, it was Tartt's first novel since The Little Friend in 2002.
The Patron Saint of Liars is a 1992 novel, written by Ann Patchett. This is the first novel published by Patchett, and it was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Patchett completed the manuscript for The Patron Saint of Liars during a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The novel focuses on a young woman named Rose who abandons her life in California as a married woman. She leaves for Kentucky and takes residence at a home for unwed mothers that is owned by the Catholic Church. As she watches girls give birth and disappear from the home, she must think of her own plans and what the future has in store for her.
Commonwealth is the seventh novel by American author Ann Patchett, published in 2016. The novel begins with an illicit kiss that leads to an affair that destroys two marriages and creates a reluctantly blended family. In a series of vignettes spanning fifty years, it tells the story of the six children whose lives were disrupted and how they intertwined.
Ann Head was an American fiction writer whose work was regularly published in magazines including Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Ladies Home Journal, and others during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is a memoir by Ann Patchett. First published in 2004 by Harper Perennial the memoir focuses on Patchett's 18 year friendship with memoirist Lucy Grealy which began when they were 21.
