At one point, the young lovestruck terrorist Carmen asks: “How much luck is one person entitled to in a night?” After her sweet confection swamped the stronger flavours also on the menu of the Orange shortlist, Ann Patchett would be entitled to reply: an awful lot.’Bel Canto’: An extractThere were those who believed they would be killed, who over and over again saw the movie of themselves being led out the door at night and shot in the back of the head, but Roxane Coss thought no such thing. The book, like the romantic opera repertoire it mimics, is an entertaining contrivance that sacrifices plausibility to bravura arias or set-piece dialogues. Meanwhile, the presence of a translator – Gen – signals the underlying theme of cross-cultural communications and confusions.The stiffness of the characters, the melodrama of the plot and the absence of reality in the South American context mean that Bel Canto sticks, more closely than Patchett might have wished, to its stagebound conventions. During the ensuing months of siege at the vice-president’s mansion, two imprisoned couples fall in love. The concert has been arranged to flatter a visiting Japanese electronics mogul, but the country’s president decides instead to stay at home and watch a much-loved soap. Fleming and Patchett recently appeared together at the Lincoln Centre in New York to discuss the novel’s premise that the power of music can bring political adversaries together.Taking its manner and structure from musical models, Bel Canto presents the incursion of comic-opera bandits into a soir?attended by a variety of national stereotypes: French, Russians, Germans, Italians. Fleming noted that two favourite parts of the fictional singer, Roxane Coss, correspond to her own signature roles: Handel’s Alcina and Dvorak’s Rusalka.

The reputations of Morrison and Atwood do not seem to have suffered as a result.Patchett’s book, set in an unnamed Latin American state, deals in a fanciful and artificial style with the capture of an American opera diva and her audience by terrorists during a private recital.The leading American soprano Ren?Fleming has recently said that Bel Canto is “about me”, and is attempting to have the book made into a film. Bel Canto was her fourth novel.Her victory follows other unexpected choices by Orange juries, such as last year’s preference for the little-known Australian novelist Kate Grenville over Margaret Atwood, and Suzanne Berne’s triumph over Toni Morrison in 1999. It included the Cambridge professor of English, Gillian Beer, the actress Fiona Shaw, and A L Kennedy, a Scottish novelist who recently claimed that drug-taking and sexual favours influenced the outcome of the Booker prize.Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and now lives in Nashville. Patchett’s book, published in the UK by Rupert Murdoch’s imprint Fourth Estate, had been the 6–1 outsider on a shortlist of six.The judging panel was headed by the retired radio presenter Sue MacGregor. It also defeated Helen Dunmore’s acclaimed novel of wartime Leningrad, The Siege, and Maggie Gee’s challenging drama of racism and reconciliation in London today, The White Family.Suitably enough, Bel Canto, which has an opera singer for its heroine, sailed off with the prize at a ceremony in the Floral Hall of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Its low popular appeal contrasts with the 35 per cent scored by the readers’ and bookies’ favourite, the highly praised Victorian mystery Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters.

The Orange prize for fiction by women sprang another of its regular surprises yesterday when the £30,000 award went to the least-liked novel among visitors to the sponsor’s website.
The judges’ winner, Bel Canto, by the American writer Ann Patchett, picked up only 10 per cent of votes on the official site. It is expected to fetch up to £3,000.Experts believe it served as an unofficial copy of the main register kept by John Linton, the former valet who owned Gretna Hall, the house where marriages were conducted.Among other elopements recorded in the book is that of Carlo Ferdinando Borbone, son of the King of Naples, who married Penelope Smyth for the third time in as many months.. Such was the outrage over the union that Wakefield was arrested in France and the marriage annulled by Parliament.The register, which has been in a private collection, is to be auctioned at Christie’s in London next month. They include the notorious wedding on 8 March 1826 of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an impoverished widower, to Ellen Turner, a 16-year-old Cheshire heiress whom he had lured from her school. A marriage register detailing some of the most famous elopements to Gretna Green, the Scottish village synonymous with teenage runaways, has been rediscovered after nearly 150 years.
The 436-page book, kept by the innkeeper whose entrepreneurial spirit turned Gretna into a magnet for young lovers, records 1,134 marriages between 1825 and 1854.

Why did anyone foist this thing on the public? Why did Naseeruddin Shah decide to squander his considerable distinction on the role of the mahout? And how did the Indians of Leicester, who I assumed would roll up in droves to see him, know to stay home?To 15 June (0116 253 9797). The king thinks his wife scornful of this plan, but she replies with a line I will remember when much else has faded: “Mock the cock? No, surely not!”There are three deep mysteries about Bali – The Sacrifice. Apparently driven mad with resentment of the queen for converting her son to Jainism, she has lost her grip on basic mother-in-law tactics, threatening to punish the couple by moving out of their palace.Learning of the queen’s adultery, she ignores her son (“Please, mother, just this once – no bloodshed”) to scream, un-Jainlike: “Cut her to pieces! Throw her bones to the dogs!” But she then offers a compromise – the marriage will be saved, she says, if the couple make a symbolic sacrifice by plunging a knife into a life-size pastry rooster. You are not permitted to indulge in violence.” Point taken, the king joins the queen for a medley of part-sung, part-spoken flashbacks to significant moments in their marriage, in which the king’s mother emerges as the troublemaker.