'Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature' Guardian
Read & Reviewed by Karen (Retired Bookseller); Author Bonnie Garmus has beautifully reviewed Tom Lake in one sentence, which I totally agree with. So I have quoted Bonnie..
"Filled with the moments I live for in a story - careful, compelling insights into human nature, the most effortless humour, and the kind of vivid descriptions that reveal exactly how something is"
A beautiful story I highly recommend.
Bonnie Garmus is the author of Lessons in Chemistry
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.
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.
Paperback / softback Trade paperback (UK) 320pp h234mm x w153mm Paperback