Her journey to Brazil begins when Mr Fox, Vogel's CEO (and Marina's secret boyfriend), delivers news that Anders Eckman, her close colleague and friend, has died suddenly in South America.Įckman went to Brazil with a simple task: to locate a brilliant but rebellious doctor, Annick Swenson, who has not updated Vogel on her progress with the fertility drug for more than two years. Marina is 42 and unmarried, facts key to her character and the book's themes. The protagonist is Marina Singh, a lab researcher for Vogel, a pharmaceutical company based in Minnesota. Yet after lots of great storytelling, with a few meandering subplots and a (nearly) unforgivable red herring, Patchett rushes the book's conclusion and makes a strange moral judgement upon the main character. The fantasy elements include magic mushrooms, magic trees, hallucinogen-induced screaming nightmares, and a giant snake attack. This and other startling images make the book a highbrow fantasy adventure dotted with social commentary on scientific advances meant to radically alter women's reproductive health. If effective, the drug would provide women with the not-entirely enticing power to have children well into their 60s or 70s, enabling them, as Patchett writes, to 'hand off their infants to their granddaughters'. State of Wonder focuses on a clash of spirits between two female doctors conducting research in the Brazilian rainforest on a miracle fertility drug. Get the scoop on which of the latest titles are worth making part of your personal collection. It's not a beach read exactly, but it will fight among books trying to make their way into people's luggage as they leave for their summer holidays. Where Bel Canto occupied a level above mainstream fiction, here Patchett uses her immense storytelling talents in a commercial, cinematic manner. There are fewer themes and characters, which allows for more nuance and layers to each person's back story.

Her new novel, State of Wonder, attempts to be an accessible crowd-pleaser. Her non-fiction work, Truth and Beauty, about her late close friend and fellow writer Lucy Grealy, showed a similar elegance. She's written four other novels, but Bel Canto's disparate motifs - from opera to terrorism - melded in her refined prose, to produce her best-known bestseller, and for good reason. Ann Patchett's lyrical orchestration of mood, theme and a universe of characters in her novel Bel Canto won her many awards, including the Orange Prize in 2002.

A state of wonder book