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Compassion and a gift for friendship are touchingly evident in Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days

11 December 2021

9:00 AM

11 December 2021

9:00 AM

These Precious Days Ann Patchett

Bloomsbury, pp.322, 16.99

It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing treatment for recurrent pancreatic cancer, came to be living in the basement of the American novelist Ann Patchett and her husband Dr Karl VanDevender.

How it happened is told in the title story of These Precious Days, Patchett’s second collection of essays.

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