Tom Lake
The Sunday Times bestseller - a BBC Radio 2 and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick
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- 74,99 lei
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- 74,99 lei
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
In this quietly revelatory novel from treasured American writer Ann Patchett, sisters Emily, Maisie and Nell return to their family’s Michigan cherry farm during the pandemic. There, they convince their reluctant mother, Lara, to tell them the story of her long ago romance with the movie star Peter Duke. Moving between past and present, Patchett sensorily evokes the two primary settings: the “crushingly pretty” Tom Lake—the summer stock theatre where Lara met Peter before he was famous—and the farm, where the women work as Lara tells her daughters about love at twenty-four and her latent dreams of being an actor. Patchett’s characters are, as ever, vividly drawn—they’re sentimental, flawed, with blind spots, white-hot feelings and big hearts. With its emotional clarity, perspective on the passing of time, and tingly conclusion, Tom Lake says so much about what it is to love and be loved.
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.
