Tom Lake
On a cherry orchard in Michigan, Lara and her husband Joe have welcomed home their three grown daughters at the start of the pandemic. The family is scrambling to harvest the cherries with a reduced staff, and the girls ask Lara to tell of her summer in stock theater at Tom Lake, where she had a romance with now-famous actor Peter Duke.
Lara stretches her story out over weeks, revealing truths, correcting her daughters' misconceptions, and keeping some precious things to herself. She revels in the time with her daughters, where time feels suspended in much the same way it did that summer at Tom Lake.
Every moment of this rare summer literary fiction novel feels like golden hour, filtered through the haze of memories, lakes, and dreamy orchards. Patchett seamlessly weaves between the timelines, while quietly revealing truths about family and personal history. Every word feels careful and perfect; I loved it. I read this in print, but I've heard the audiobook narrated by Meryl Streep is also sublime.
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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.
