Tom Lake
The Sunday Times bestseller - a BBC Radio 2 and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick
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3.9 • 137 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The breath-taking new novel from Ann Patchett – a Sunday Times and No. 1 New York Times bestseller
'Filled with the moments I live for in a story'
BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry
'[Tom Lake] has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships'
REESE WITHERSPOON
'One of the most beloved authors of her generation'
SUNDAY TIMES
There's more to every love story than what we choose to tell...
It's spring and Lara's three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they've always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
'One of our greatest living chroniclers of love and marriage … Expect wonder; Patchett always delivers' ELLE
* SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 *
* A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK *
* A 2023 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES *
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
COVID reunites Lara and Joe’s family at their Michigan farm. A chance for them all to be together as they have not been for years—and for their daughters to finally get the full story of Lara’s youthful romance with film star Peter Duke—or so they believe. As the novel moves seamlessly back and forth in time between the present and the golden, hazy days of early promise, Lara deftly balances the demands of her offspring for the truth with the knowledge that there are parental mysteries that must be forever protected. Unusually perhaps, there’s no regret in Lara’s voice for the roads not taken, only tenderness for young woman she was, and empathy for her children embarking on their adult lives amid such uncertainty. Ann Patchett is truly a master at work and every finely wrought sentence, every beautifully observed character, every lovingly evoked landscape is testament to this.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patchett (The Dutch House) unspools a masterly family drama set in the early months of Covid-19. Lara and her husband live on a cherry orchard in northern Michigan, where they welcome their three adult daughters home to shelter in place. Emily, the oldest, is a young farmer who will inherit the family farm; Maisie is a veterinarian; and Nell, the youngest at 22, dreams of becoming an actress. They pass the hours picking fruit and listening to Lara tell the tale of her long-ago romance with "Duke," a young actor who went on to become a major celebrity. Lara and Duke met during a summer stock production of Our Town, where she played Emily and he played her father, Editor Webb. Patchett alternates between present-day scenes of the cherry orchard and Lara's younger years, including her brief foray as an actor in Hollywood, before an accident put a sudden end to her career. "There's a lot you don't know," Lara tells Emily, Maisie, and Nell at the novel's opening, and as Patchett's slow-burn narrative gathers dramatic steam, she blends past and present with dexterity and aplomb, as the daughters come to learn more of the truth about Lara's Duke stories, causing them to reshape their understanding of their mother. Patchett is at the top of her game.
Customer Reviews
Out of towners
3.5 stars
It’s 2020. Lara and Jim Nelson and their three twenty-something daughters are “sheltering in place” in Northern Michigan on their commercial orchard (apples and cherries) during Covid lockdown. It’s all hands on deck to get the harvest in because of the lack of itinerant fruit pickers. Prior to marrying Jim, Lara had a short as an actress, during which she had a year long romance with an actor who went on to stardom. She doesn’t think about him anymore, but the gals pump her of details. She reveals more than she ever has before, but holds some things back.
The conceit is that protagonist Lara grew up in New Hampshire and got her start as an actress in the Thornton Wilder play ‘Our Town,” which is a perennial favourite in the Granite State because it’s set there. For those unfamiliar, it is a play within a play with no scenery or curtains. The Stage Manager is a central character who marshals the other actors.
Third person narrative, principally from Lara’s POV.
Characters include Lara, Jim, their daughters, the famous actor and his older brother. All are well developed.
Ms P is as fine stylist as there is going around at present. She specialises in character driven domestic/family dramas of the quotidian variety. There’s a couple of twists, and some excellent dry wit, but for those of us less familiar with, or less taken with, ‘Our Town’ and it’s stage manager role than the author clearly is, it can be a tad boring. I thought everyone was too nice, apart from the actor dude. He wasn’t centre stage enough to generate the frisson that made ‘Commonwealth’ (2016) and ‘The Dutch House’ (2019) better books IMO.
Note
Tom Lake is a place in Northern Michigan not far from the orchard that hosts stock theatre productions over summer (“summer stock”).
Did not Finish
Not sure what the hype was about. This book was boring, boring, boring.
Slow read
I struggled to read the first half of the book and was going to abandon it but as it’s a bookclub book, I skipped through to the last 6 or 7 chapters and felt like I hadn’t missed much. The setting is in an orchard, with COVID in the background, at the start of cherry picking, which then flows onto pears and apples as summer turns into autumn. The whole family is at home and sets out daily to pick the fruit on the trees. The family consists of a wife, a husband, their 3 grown up daughters, and dog and a rather lame story, told over days and weeks of picking, of the wife’s past relationship with a famous movie star. It was totally far fetched in places and it struggled to hold my attention.