The Chateau

This Orange Inheritance Edition of is published in association with the Orange Prize for Fiction. Books shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of the Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next generation and why. Ann Patchett chose .

In rural Illinois, two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers — the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent’s misery — is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime’s regret.

"The novel comes from a place so deep inside the human soul that I cannot imagine a time its wisdom would not feel fresh and applicable."-Ann Patchett