Bel Canto
Terrorists seize a party at the vice presidential mansion in an unnamed South American country. An opera singer is among the hostages. Patchett's 2001 novel, loosely based on the 1996 Japanese embassy siege in Lima, turns a hostage crisis into a fable about art, language, and unexpected love. Won the PEN/Faulkner and the Orange Prize. The prose is calm where the situation is not.
Patchett asks you to believe four months of captivity turns terrorists and hostages into a chamber-music idyll, soft-focusing a siege based on one where real people died. The captors grow more lovable as the massacre approaches, sentiment doing the work dread should. And the epilogue pairs off two survivors whose marriage the novel never earned; stop at the final chapter and the book improves.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
