Whistler

by Ann Patchett · 2026

Daphne, a high-school English teacher in New York, is shadowed through the Metropolitan Museum by an old man named Eddie, whom she first met as a nine-year-old trapped with him in a snowbound crashed car. Moving between that childhood night and the present, the novel follows her complicated family, her mother and stepfather, her sister Leda, and the long bond with the man who once edited novels.

Books mentioned in Whistler (17)

• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: “"I only ask to live another hundred years so that your memory will remain with me that much longer" (epigraph)”
• Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh: “I was directed to read her Harriet the Spy and play Go Fish”
• Charlotte's Web by E. B. White: “her paperback copy of Charlotte's Web”
• The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima: “Did you ever read that Mishima novel, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea?”
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: “I read Madame Bovary because of you”
• Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert: “she read A Sentimental Education for fun”
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: “When they read David Copperfield, they read the whole thing”
• The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: “They read The Return of the Native.”
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: “The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester”
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: “The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester”
• Independent People by Halldór Laxness: “"Independent People." "Halldór Laxness, Iceland, published in two volumes in 1934 and '35"”
• Men's Lives by Peter Matthiessen: “a Peter Matthiessen book called Men's Lives, about fishing off the coast of Long Island”
• The Tibetan Book of the Dead by Padmasambhava: “"What have you been reading?" "The Tibetan Book of the Dead."”
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: “"You read the George Saunders novel" (the bardo)”
• Wild Grapes by Robert Frost: “He thought of Robert Frost, "Wild Grapes"”
• Fire and Ice by Robert Frost: “"Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice" (Frost poems and car accidents)”
• Name Your Baby by Lareina Rule: “a book called Name Your Baby”