India, May 29 -- Goodness leaps out at you in the unlikeliest places, in Ann Patchett's books.

Bel Canto (2001), which won the Women's Prize (then called the Orange Prize for Fiction) and the PEN/Faulkner Award, is about an unlikely friendship between a band of terrorists and an opera singer. In Commonwealth (2016), the most autobiographical of her works, an illicit relationship eventually brings two families together.

The author from Nashville has a new book out on Tuesday (June 2). Whistler is about Daphne, a 53-year-old woman who runs into her stepfather, a man her mother was married to for about a year when she was nine, after a gap of decades. The novel traces how small yet consequential moments can define our lives, and how goodne...