List $39.95

Written by Ann Patchett - Audio book performed by Julia Gibson - Unabridged Fiction - COMPACT DISCS

Publisher, Harper Audio (September 2007)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

Listen to an MP3 audio interview with Ann Patchett.

A New York Times Notable Book

"Beautifully written. . . . Ann Patchett has produced a first novel that second- and third-time novelists would envy for its grace, insight, and compassion." — Boston Herald

"The Patron Saint of Liars is a remarkable novel. . . . Ann Patchett is unique: a generous, fearless, and startlingly wise young writer." — New York Times Book Review

St. Elizabeth's is a home for unwed mothers in the 1960s. Life there is not unpleasant, and for most, it is temporary. Not so for Rose, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed. She plans to give up her baby because she knows she cannot be the mother it needs. But St. Elizabeth's is near a healing spring, and when Rose's time draws near, she cannot go through with her plans, not all of them. And she cannot remain forever untouched by what she has left behind . . . and who she has become in the leaving.

About the Author: Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. It was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, Taft, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician's Assistant, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her next novel, Bel Canto, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named the Book Sense Book of the Year. It sold over a million copies in the United States and has been translated into thirty languages. In 2004, Patchett published Truth & Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. Truth & Beauty was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association.

She was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006.

Patchett has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Gourmet, and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, Karl VanDevender.