I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

Bernard Academy a private non-parochial Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Awards and honors
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (Taft)
PEN/Faulkner Award (Bel Canto)
Orange Prize (Bel Canto)
BookSense Book of the Year (Bel Canto)
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Bel Canto)
2011: Wellcome Trust Book Prize shortlist (State of Wonder)


Bibliography


Novels
The Patron Saint of Liars (1992)
Taft (1994)
The Magician's Assistant (1997)
Bel Canto (2001)
Run (2007)
State of Wonder (2011)


Nonfiction
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship (2004)
What now? (2008)
The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (2011). Her third novel The Magician’s Assistant was released in 1997.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award in 1994. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto.