by Ann Patchett
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.
Reviews-
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Starred review from June 26, 2023
Patchett (The Dutch House) unspools a masterly family drama set in the early months of Covid-19. Lara and her husband live on a cherry orchard in northern Michigan, where they welcome their three adult daughters home to shelter in place. Emily, the oldest, is a young farmer who will inherit the family farm; Maisie is a veterinarian; and Nell, the youngest at 22, dreams of becoming an actress. They pass the hours picking fruit and listening to Lara tell the tale of her long-ago romance with “Duke,” a young actor who went on to become a major celebrity. Lara and Duke met during a summer stock production of Our Town, where she played Emily and he played her father, Editor Webb. Patchett alternates between present-day scenes of the cherry orchard and Lara’s younger years, including her brief foray as an actor in Hollywood, before an accident put a sudden end to her career. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” Lara tells Emily, Maisie, and Nell at the novel’s opening, and as Patchett’s slow-burn narrative gathers dramatic steam, she blends past and present with dexterity and aplomb, as the daughters come to learn more of the truth about Lara’s Duke stories, causing them to reshape their understanding of their mother. Patchett is at the top of her game. -
Meryl's Streep's captivating performance of Ann Patchett's new novel transforms the fine book into a must-listen. As the Nelson family-- Lara, Joe, and three adult daughters--isolate together on their Michigan cherry farm in the first year of the Covid pandemic, Lara entertains the girls with memories of working in summer stock theater at nearby Tom Lake and dating an actor who became a famous movie star. The dramas and emotional truths of long ago and today constitute the core of this resonant story. Streep narrates with breathtaking sensitivity to those emotional truths. Instead of character voices, she delivers realism, shifting rhythm and tone to reveal personalities. Never overdramatizing, she speaks with warmth, savoring with us the novel's many lessons and satisfactions. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
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December 2, 2023
Patchett's (The Dutch House) latest is narrated by Meryl Streep, who, in addition to her A-list acting, narrated Nora Ephron's Heartburn and garnered an Audie Award for her performance in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. The inimitable Streep is Lara Kenison, whose three twentysomething daughters have come home during the COVID-19 lockdown. Between working in the family's cherry orchard--without the usual seasonal employees--Lara regales her daughters (again) with pre-motherhood stories as a summer stock actor sharing the stage with the recently dead Peter Duke, just before he became a major Hollywood star. Streep effortlessly deploys her acting charms, creating enviable sleight-of-voice characterizations for a vast cast moving between decades past and the isolated present. The initially enthralling hours pass swiftly--until they don't. Too many crystalline details, sharp musings, and reflective what-ifs overwhelm the narrative until even Streep struggles to enliven the pace. VERDICT Any disappointments aside, the significant demand that Patchett's text and Streep's performance will generate is inevitable; whether starters become finishers could be a different story.--Terry Hong
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