But if you allow yourself to walk along with Patchett, you’ll find riches at the end of the trail. This novel takes a winding road through the forest and doesn’t rush to a finish, nor is the ending wholly surprising. There’s no missing the statement’s brutal, brilliant ambivalence.

'The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth,' Patchett wrote in her memoir This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage - a belief her new novel shares but shades with caution. Our willingness to serve each other represents the best of us, according to Patchett, and it is almost as if she wants to take the notion of motherhood and release its power into the commons - what if we were willing to mother one another, mother strangers? But she is also always full of warnings about the self-abnegation it requires, especially of women - and never more clearly than in this new novel. But like the family’s Dutch house, it’s an enduring structure, which gives an added dimension to the references in the text - its way of gesturing toward a lineage.

It can feel old-fashioned: her style, her attachment to a very traditional kind of storytelling - a vision of the novel as a Dutch house, with a clarity and transparency of purpose and method, a refusal of narrative tricksiness. I can’t pluck out one sentence worth quoting, but how effective they are when woven together-these translucent lines that envelop you like a spider’s web. “She was a woman I had known in my childhood and now did not know at all.” An epic journey in the space of a few sentences.Patchett’s prose is confident, unfussy and unadorned. There was nothing extraordinary about her,” and finally the occasion for sad revelation.

“She was entirely too close, our stepmother, as close as a person on the other side of the street” and then mundane, “I could see both how she had aged and how she was exactly herself: eyes, nose, chin. She hadn’t expected the early morning dark to be so clear or the moon so full, and she stood there, taking it in.” Simple language, primarily one-syllable words to convey a moment of almost unbearable suspense, as the orphans watch and speculate on the woman who “threw us out.” In Danny’s account, an ordinary act - picking up a newspaper - becomes ominous.

Danny observes: “She hadn’t stopped for a scarf. In perhaps the most dramatic scene in the book, Maeve and Danny sit in their parked car and watch as their stepmother emerges from the Dutch House to retrieve her newspaper. Here again, the situation sounds both bleak and fanciful, but Patchett writes with restraint, never indulging in overwrought language.

Book the dutch house