Commonwealth
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Bloomsbury / 2016
Pages: 322

It is 1964. It all started at Franny Keating's christening party.

The environment is southern California and, generally speaking, Catholic, and centred around police.

Bert Cousins shows up at the christening party uninvited. He was looking for an excuse to get out of the house, away from his three noisy children and pregnant wife for a few hours.

He brought with him a bottle of gin and he took a kiss from Beverly, Franny's very beautiful mother.

Thus began an affair that ended two marriages and set in motion the joining of the two families whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later.

Bringing the children of two divorces together under one roof is called a "blended family" but this family does not blend. On the contrary, what emerges is a curious commonwealth of neglected children.

This is the story how their lives were disrupted and how they variously intertwined and what really happened on this fateful day seven years later on the day that one child died.

It is 1988, 26 years after the christening. Franny Keating, now a law school dropout, working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago, embarks on an affair with a very famous novelist, much older than her. She has no inkling that her memories of her childhood could be brought together into a best-selling novel, entitled Commonwealth, a book in a book.

It had to be the baby of the family, Albie Cousins, to discover his past in this book. The issues come together - the theft of family secrets and questions about the border between fact and fiction.

Over the course of five decades, while the Keating-Cousins children were all going their own ways, they were still a family, still bound by shared memories and still bound together with real affection.

The story is rather autobiographical as Patchett's parents got divorced when she was young and the mother married someone who had four children. And they had to move to the other side of the country, though not to Virginia. It had been a complicated but also a very interesting experience.

This book is the seventh novel by the American author. Ann Patchett received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year for her novel Bel Canto. Her other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician's Assistant, Run, State of Wonder and The Dutch House.