Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 320 pages
First Published: 2023
View in Goodreads
Buy on Amazon
Publisher’s Description
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.
About Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is the author of eight novels, four nonfiction books, and one children’s book. Her works include The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, Commonwealth, These Precious Days, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and The Dutch House. She is the co-owner of the bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee where she lives with her husband. Visit the author’s website →