Tom Lake
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4.0 • 47 Ratings
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • READ BY MERYL STREEP
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature.” —The Guardian
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The prolific Ann Patchett paints a tender portrait of a caring woman, her close-knit family, and the dazzling stories of her past in this reflective and captivating novel. Before Lara lived in Northern Michigan on an orchard with her loving husband and three daughters, she was an actress destined for stardom. She even dated a famous movie star, the dashing Peter Duke—a piece of Lara’s past that her daughters (the delightfully distinct Emily, Maisie, and Nell, now in their 20s) obsess over. From her first audition in her small New Hampshire hometown to her time spent in New York, Los Angeles, and a Michigan summer-stock theater called Tom Lake, Lara recounts her past life to her children during a hot summer in the midst of the pandemic. Narrated by none other than Meryl Streep, whose voice adds warmth and gravitas to this compassionate tale of mothers, daughters, and lovers, Tom Lake is a breathtaking—and heartbreaking—look at the unpredictable journeys our lives take.
