‘Publishing was ruined. Amazon, Germans, the end of antitrust laws, printing in China, take your pick.’ So laments Eddie Triplett, whose reappearance in the life of his former stepdaughter propels the narrative of Ann Patchett’s latest novel. It’s a funny stance for the author to be taking – even when ventriloquised through one of her characters. Since her breakthrough 2001 novel, Bel Canto, Patchett has become a celebrated and popular writer, particularly in her native America, producing novels that are ideal fodder for reading clubs like the one she runs from her bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee. Her characters often air their problems over brunch, or while passing around a ‘dish of roasted sweet potatoes’ at Thanksgiving dinner. This is fiction written with the likely audience – well-to-do and well behaved – as its starting point.

Whistler reads like real life with the interesting bits distilled. In the opening scene, the 53-year-old narrator, Daphne Fuller, and her husband are on a day out at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when they realise they are being followed by an old man. It is Eddie, her mother’s