Tom Lake

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.

With her pragmatic narrative voice, elegant turn of phrase and storylines that have explored everything from a South American hostage crisis to blended family dynamics and the ethics of drug research, the Bel Canto author has long been regarded as one of America’s finest and most accessible authors. Rosemary Neill, The Australian
What could have been a nostalgic coming-of-age story is elevated by Patchett’s rigorous details of character and dialogue, literary allusions and real-world concerns… Patchett writes with her usual humanity and time switches so fluid you can’t see the joins. Tom Lake is a reassuring portrait of our plague-time, an antidote to dystopian hysteria, the Patchett novel we need now. Susan Wyndham, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
A powerful meditation on love (obsessive, married, maternal), a compelling portrait of the seductions (and pitfalls) of the theatre, and a reminder to cherish the good things in life. Deeply satisfying. Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
It’s really about treasuring the little moments in life, the small moments of beauty, that seems to be something your book is interested in too. Claire Nichols, The Book Show, ABC Radio National
Tom Lake is Ann’s first novel since The Dutch House, and it’s a triumphant return for the author… Tom Lake is a moving story of young love, marriage, and family. And it’s a thoughtful and introspective look into relationships and the truths we tell ourselves and others. Good Reading magazine
How does Patchett do it?! For a writer who is so committed to reassuring readers that there is goodness in the world, her books somehow avoid being described as glib and trite. There is a decency to them that feels wholesome, and, yet, this never eclipses the complexities of her characters’ lives. Add in some beautifully measured prose, together with sophisticated storytelling techniques that aren’t always noticed on account of their sophistication, and I think you’ve got yourself a near-perfect novel. Laura Brading, Primer
Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake is a gentle exploration of memory, of love, of the joys and the pains of life, and of the unexpected ways in which things happen and life changes. Ann Skea, The Newtown Review of Books
Ann Patchett is a comfort in every book she writes, her soft voice and gentle distance making the raw and uncompromising view into desire and love and hope feel even more sharp when it pierces through the page… for readers, you will be there, hooked on Patchett’s every sentence, a cherry bucket around your neck waiting for all the sweet fruit she will hand you. Readings
As the portrait of a level-headed but quizzical family, it’s very convincing The Listener, New Zealand
A deeply satisfying book. One of a kind. Francesca Rudkin, The Sunday Session, Radio NewstalkZB, New Zealand

Ann Patchett is the author of eight novels and three works of non-fiction. Her most recent novel The Dutch House was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize. In 2002 she won the Orange Prize for Fiction with Bel Canto, a prize she has also twice been shortlisted for with The Magician’s Assistant in 1998 and State of Wonder in 2012. She is also the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, Karl.

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