Tom Lake: A Novel

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

In this beautiful & moving novel about family, love, & 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 & a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives & relationship with their mother, & are forced to reconsider the world & everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, & the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful & 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 & luminous story, told with profound intelligence & emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered & acclaimed literary talents working today.

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Ann Patchett is the author of novels, works of nonfiction, & children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize in the U.K., & the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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.