Tom Lake: A Novel

Ann Patchett

Aug 2023 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK

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.

Ratings and reviews

Though not my favorite book by this author (3.5 stars is be more accurate), Ann Patchett's rich characters will keep you reading. It's an exploration of family, human connection, and the different kinds of love we humans experience throughout our lives.

I loved this book! I grew up on a farm and understand the feeling of love and belonging, of family history. the feeling of coming home when you have been away. I will revisit Wilder's play.

The stars are because I completely understood and related to this character - her age, experiences, what an affair smells and feels like, her subservient position wth her lover and the things you'll do under that influence, and of course, the children. The impact of COVID on our young purple cannot be overstated, and she described it perfectly in her prose.

About the author

Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.