"At the age of 24, Lara Kenison is well on her way to a successful career as an actress. Her firstmovie is about to be released and she has a starring role in a summer stock production of OurTown, plus a summer romance with her co-star who will go on to become very, very famous. At57, her acting career long behind her, she’s a cherry farmer in Northern Michigan with a loving husband and three grown daughters. This little gem of a book is a reflection on how the life you get isn’t necessarily the life you thought you were going to have, echoing the themes of Our Town, but with a twist: sometimes you get something better. Chekhov fans, expect Cherry Orchard jokes."
Publisher Harper
Publication Date 2023-08-01
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780063327528
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
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.
