The bestselling novelist explains that her Catholic upbringing gave her the greatest gift a writer can have – the possibility that there is something deeper out there

The lives of saints inspire us to be better than we are, but those same qualities that make them role models in the Church – their intensity of focus on living out gospel values, and their refusal to compromise – can be experienced as something else when it is within their own families. That is the theme of Ann Patchett’s latest novel, The Dutch House. It tells of Elna, a former postulant and Catholic mother of two small children, who leaves them behind in their lavish folly of a home in small-town Pennsylvania to dedicate her life to the destitute in India.

“I started out imagining Elna as something of a saint,” Patchett tells me via Skype from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, her travel plans for the launch of the paperback of The Dutch House ending up locked down by coronavirus. “What I wanted to write about was that journey for a woman with children in which she was the hero.”

She realised, she says, it was a challenge from the start but, as the writer of seven novels that have been both global bestsellers and prize winners (2002’s Bel Canto scooped both the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, while Time magazine declared Patchett in 2012 to be one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World), she was undaunted. And she knew all about how saints’ lives turn on their head any conventional expectations from her own 12 years being raised in the Catholic faith at a Sisters of Mercy convent school in the city where she still lives.