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Ann Patchett knows this is going to sound odd, but it's true, so here goes: About seven or eight years ago, in the middle of working on what would become her breakout 2001 novel Bel Canto, she awoke suddenly at two o'clock in the morning, shook her husband from sleep, and told him she'd just spoken to God.

"I dreamed that God came to me and said He wanted to save the world again, and this time he was gonna adopt a kid - to prove that anybody could do it if they were well raised," said Patchett the other morning over breakfast at a midtown hotel. She was flying home to Nashville in a few hours, and was dressed for travelling, in black jeans and a casual sweater. "He said, 'In fact, I'm gonna get two kids, and whichever one turns out the best, I'll use that one.' And I said, Wouldn't it be so awful for the kid who didn't get picked? And God said to me: He's still God's son. I mean, even if he's not the saviour of the world, it's still a good spot' "

If it sounds like the slam-dunk premise of a good new book (not to say a new Good Book), it took Patchett years of start-and-stop work before she found a suitable translation of the dream: There was something odd about writing about God.

Eventually, in what became her exhilarating new novel, Run, set in Boston, she dropped the actual deity and substituted a John F. Kennedy-style politician, which in Boston is pretty much the same thing.

The God, if you will, of Run is Richard Doyle, a former Boston mayor, who has three sons: the wandering Sullivan, born of his late wife Bernadette; and Tip and Teddy, black men granted Kennedy clan names when they were adopted as young boys into the white Doyle family. One snow-blind winter's evening, during an argument with his father, Tip absentmindedly steps off a curb and is narrowly saved by a woman who darts into the street and body-checks him out of the way of an oncoming SUV. His saviour winds up in hospital and her 10-year-old daughter, having no other place to go, takes refuge with the Doyles, setting in motion a tumultuous 24 hours.

In that sense, Run echoes her other novels, from The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), which centred on a pregnant woman who leaves her husband to live in a home for unwed mothers; to The Magician's Assistant, about a woman who discovers the mother and sister of her partner after his death; to Bel Canto, which threw together South American terrorists and a group of hostages in a mansion for a months-long siege.

"I think everybody really does have some theme that they keep going back to, no matter how hard they try," she says. So why is this theme so important to her? "It's just somehow at the centre of my heart, what is compelling to me" - she gestures at a waiter who has just passed by - "the idea that the waiter could be the most important person in my life.

And unless I'm open-minded to the waiter, I would miss that. You never know who you're gonna meet, you never know who's gonna change your life, and you have to stay open to those possibilities.

"Either that, or my parents married off and I had a lot of step-siblings. If you like that answer, that would work, too." She laughs. Patchett, 43, is generous with her humour but there is a whiff of caution to her manner, and she has a faint tightness in her face that makes her look from some angles like the actress Emily Watson. (More movie star comparisons: she has the verbal exactitude and endlessly patient tone of Laura Linney.)

The reception for Run has been largely enthusiastic: The Globe's reviewer wrote, "Only a gifted imagination can steep this family brew as plausibly and gracefully as she does." But not everyone has embraced the book. During breakfast, Patchett is still smarting from a dismissive review published two days before in USA Today, and while John Updike had some very nice things to say about her other books in his New Yorker review, he didn't much care for Run.

"But you know what?" says Patchett philosophically. "Jonathan Safran Foer said to me once, a bad review by John Updike in The New Yorker is still a pretty damned nice thing. And it's true, it makes me feel serious and arrived, and if I'm gonna have somebody have me for lunch, I'd just as soon it be Updike."

The few influential poor reviews don't much seem to have affected the reading public's affection for her or the book. The night before this breakfast, Patchett held court at a standing-room-only Barnes & Noble reading on the Upper West Side. (Indeed, they had to close the door to the glassed-in room because more people kept trying to squeeze in.

"It was like a Dickens novel, people pressing their little noses against the glass," Patchett giggles.) Tomorrow, Run will debut in the eighth spot on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list.

Updike's chief complaint, which echoes comments Patchett has received on other books, is that she depicts the world not as it is but as she would like it to be - or, as he phrased it: "everybody is nice, given half a chance."

Sometimes, this interpretation can lead to people misreading her work.

"I feel like I'm writing political novels. I am often told I'm writing heartwarming novels about family. I remember when one of the best reviews of Bel Canto came out, it says: The greatest love story ever told. And I thought: Damn, I thought I was writing a book about the intersection of wealth and poverty."

Still, Patchett doesn't see Updike's criticism as a legitimate complaint. "Most of the people that I know, and certainly all the people that I love and am close to, are really good people," she says. Indeed, the geography of her personal life reinforces this: her husband's ex-wife lives a couple of miles away, and often visits to share in the joy of Patchett's four-month-old step-grandson, who lives about three blocks away.

"You know, I feel so strongly that I am one lousy little novelist - 'lousy' as in 'small'- in a huge number of present-day novelists and dead novelists, there are so many good books out there. Everything is covered. I am one chip in all the work. And if I was writing the only novel of the year, maybe I would think: God, I really need to represent some of the hideous aspects of human nature. But they're fine, they're covered, and I can put my chip in what interests me, not because I think I'm gonna change the world and not because I'm trying to create a world the way I want to see it, but it is actually the way I feel about the world. I have tremendous faith in human nature."

Patchett grew up Catholic, though she hasn't been to Mass in years because, she says, "It's really boring. It's pitched to a third-grade level. I keep saying, I'm looking for Advanced Placement Catholicism."

Still, she says, "I think Catholicism was fantastic for my work. I spent my childhood praying to giant carved pieces of rock. On my knees every day saying my little prayer beads - it's a ridiculous religion It's all about fantasy. Grow up reading Butler's Lives of the Saints and believing it Believing if you take your last piece of bread and crumble it up and give to the birds, all those little birds will go and bring back one piece of wheat - I love that I love those stories. I love the idea that impossible things can happen. When people say to me: there's a big element of magic realism in your books, I think: No, there's not. It could happen, it could happen.

Even now, "I really had a belief system, and I think that's a great thing to have if what you do is make things up for a living," she says.

"There's still some level in which that's my mythology. I had a mythology, and I think that for a lot of people growing up, their mythology is just television."