Commonwealth is the seventh novel by American author Ann Patchett, published in 2016. The novel begins with an illicit kiss that leads to an affair that destroys two marriages and creates a reluctantly blended family. In a series of vignettes spanning fifty years, it tells the story of the six children whose lives were disrupted and how they intertwined. Plot It started at Franny Keating’s christening party. Bert Cousins wasn't even invited, but looking for an excuse to get out of the house, away from his three noisy children and pregnant wife for a few hours one weekend, he followed up on another fellow’s invitation. He brought a bottle of gin and he took a kiss from Franny’s very beautiful mother that day. Thus began an affair that ended two marriages and led Bert to begin thinking up excuses to get out of the house away from his four children from southern California and his two stepchildren every day of their summer vacations in Virginia. Bringing the children of two divorces together under one roof may be called a “blended family” but this family does not blend. There forms a curious commonwealth of neglected children. This is the story about how their lives were disrupted and how they intertwined and what really happened the day that one child died. Twenty six years after her christening, when law school dropout Franny embarks on an affair with a much older very famous novelist, she has no inkling that her childhood memories could, in time, be woven into a best-selling novel, titled “Commonwealth.” When the baby of the family, Albie Cousins, discovers his past in black and white, readers are struck by the theft of family secrets, raising questions about borders between fact and fiction. Over the course of five decades, while the Keating-Cousins children were all going their own ways, they were still a family, still bound by shared memories and ultimately real affection. Development history In an interview entitled "Ann Patchett Calls 'Commonwealth' Her 'Autobiographical First Novel'," Patchett said, “My parents got divorced when I was young, and my mother married someone who had four children. And we moved to the other side of the country, albeit not to Virginia. And I think that that being thrown together, being pulled out of a family and put into a family has always been very interesting to me. ... It's so complicated. It's