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If you have a writer in your life, you need to live with the constant knowledge that they are probably going to use your interactions as inspiration for a story. Ann Patchett is drawing on her experience of losing a close friend as the basis for the follow-up to 2023’s Tom Lake, Whistler.

Whistler is due out in Spring 2026 and is about Daphne Fuller, a woman who reunites with her former stepfather after they run into each other at an art museum. Publisher Harper describes the novel as “a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.”

Patchett told People magazine back when the novel was first announced about the tragic origins of the book. “Whistler was a gift. I was missing a very close friend who had recently died, and in missing him, I imagined what life might have been like if we were two different people in a very different relationship. Nothing that happens in this book happened to us, and we are not these people, but all the love is there.”

Ann Patchett is an award-winning novelist whose catalogue includes The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, State of Wonder, and Tom Lake. Her upcoming novel, Whistler, is inspired by the loss of a close friend and is due out in Spring 2026. 

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