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Ann Patchett’s Pandemic Novel

By Katy Waldman

When the author Ann Patchett was five years old, her family broke apart. Her mother divorced her father, married the man with whom she’d been having an affair, and moved Patchett and her sister from Los Angeles to Nashville. Patchett gained four new siblings and an additional parent. Years later, when she was twenty-seven, her mother remarried again. “I suffered from abundance,” she writes in “My Three Fathers,” a 2020 essay for this magazine. As a girl, she would fly back to L.A. for a week every summer to see her birth father. Often, they’d go to Forest Lawn cemetery. “We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried,” Patchett writes. She adds that the scent of carnations can still return her to “those happy afternoons.” The cemetery, crowded but lonely, gives off echoes of her unconventional ménage, and Patchett fashions it into a figure for family itself: a plot in which you’re trapped with a bunch of strangers, a place of mingled loss and togetherness.

Most of Patchett’s work is directly or indirectly about the experience of being stuck in a difficult family. She is a connoisseur of ambivalent interpersonal dynamics within closed groups. “Bel Canto” (2001), her breakout novel, traces the bonds that develop among terrorists and their prisoners. “State of Wonder” (2011) follows a scientist searching for her colleagues in the Amazon rain forest. In the Pulitzer finalist “The Dutch House” (2019), two grown siblings return compulsively to their unhappy childhood: “Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.”

Patchett is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape. In “Commonwealth” (2016), her most autobiographical novel, six children flung together by their parents’ affair form a fraught alliance, in which the older kids routinely drug their baby brother with Benadryl. The father leaves his gun within easy reach of the kids, and the mother grabs glassy-eyed time-outs in the car. One son becomes obsessed with the art of setting fires, almost burning down his school.

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In her twenties, Franny, the protagonist, appears to transcend her upbringing by recounting it to a famous novelist, who turns it into a best-selling work of fiction. It’s a thrillingly illicit inversion, or seems to be: Franny was trapped in her family, but now she has trapped them in a book; she has transformed the sinkhole of her past into a resource. But as her relatives bear up under “the inestimable burden of their lives”—the kids marrying and procreating, the parents retiring and sickening—their family narratives evolve. A mute sibling is rebranded “the smart one.” When Franny reconnects with Albie, the brother so monstrous his siblings fed him Benadryl, she notes with surprise that “there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.” Franny’s family is a resource, she realizes, but she has mistaken its nature—it is not an heirloom to be handed off to a stranger but a commons, an inexhaustible font of ever-changing roles and stories. As the novel draws to a close, Patchett celebrates this reserve, accelerating through scenes of connection: a beach trip, a party, a talk on the porch. The gatherings suggest that talismanic word, abundance. They portray a kind of land wealth—a richness of common ground.

In “Tom Lake,” Patchett’s ninth and newest novel (Harper), members of a summer theatre troupe in rural Michigan in the nineteen-eighties coalesce into something like an incestuous family. They share housing, meals, and beds; their community is rife with intense, fleeting intimacies. As the group is putting on a production of “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder, the actress cast as Emily, the play’s ingénue, drops out. A young performer named Lara arrives to pinch-hit. Lara didn’t formally study theatre, but she has an uncanny ability to inhabit the role. “He understood what he was looking at,” she says of one director. “A pretty girl who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing.”

At Tom Lake, the town where the troupe is based, Lara is greeted by the cast as star, savior, and potential love interest. She has eyes only for twenty-eight-year-old Peter Duke, who plays Emily’s father. Within days, she and Duke are spending all their time together, rehearsing, having sex, or swimming in the lake. The summer becomes a blur of overlapping absorptions—in Wilder’s language, in the water, in one another. “We wore our swimsuits under our clothes and ran to the lake in lieu of eating lunch,” Lara recalls. “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat.”

Tom Lake is a fairy tale, a conjunction of person, time, and place, and it is as transient as any idyll, slipping through Lara’s fingers even as half a day seems to last “a solid six months.” “No one gets to go on playing Emily forever,” she thinks, preëmptively grieving. The curtain falls sooner than she expects. On the tennis court, Lara ruptures her Achilles tendon; her understudy, a magnetic Black dancer named Pallace, steps into the Emily part. Watching her friend take the stage, Lara later remembers, “I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.” When the summer ends, Duke goes on to a wildly successful career in Hollywood. Lara quits acting, marries a cherry farmer, and becomes a mother.

In the spring of 2020, at the start of the COVID -19 lockdown, Lara, now fifty-seven, is sheltering in place on the family farm with her husband, Joe Nelson, and their three twentysomething daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell. With harvesters scarce, the Nelsons have to pick and process their own fruit; to make the time go by faster, Lara tells the girls about her brief career as an actor.

The early pandemic, with its claustrophobic intimacy, seems almost tailor-made for Patchett’s interests. “Tom Lake” is about being caught in an intractable family situation. It is about being constrained by one’s role—in this case, motherhood—and it is about the transformations wrought by the passage of time and the search for confinement’s upsides. The seasonal beauty of the fruit trees evokes the ephemeral loveliness of youth, romance, and fame; the novel, which is haunted by classics of theatre, repeatedly invokes Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” as if Lara, like that play’s central character, were lost in a reverie about herself in her prime.

But Patchett airs the suggestion that Lara is stranded in the past only to gently put it to rest. Despite Duke’s “ubiquitous presence in the world,” Lara notices, scrubbing a lasagna pan to the strains of one of his movies, “I thought of him remarkably little.” Chekhov, with his warnings about the hazards of nostalgia, turns out to be a red herring; a bigger portion of the book’s soul resides in “Our Town,” Wilder’s play about daily life which ends in a cemetery, where the dead are “weaned away from the earth.” Lara uses the text as a touchstone, channelling its mood of elegiac acceptance as she carefully detaches herself from her old wounds and triumphs:

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.

Lara’s thinking here feels infused with sensitivity to the personal—to the vividness of life as it pierces a single subject—but the immediacy of pain and joy has mellowed, over time, into something richer and stranger. “Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before,” Lara says of Duke. Later: “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”

A story is artificial, which means it can be fun. Lara isn’t so much recalling the summer of 1988 as she is performing it—playing both her younger self and her current one, selectively concocting a PG-rated soap opera for her wide-eyed Zoomers. She finesses, elides. “I’m not telling them the good parts,” she says, meaning the incredible sex with Duke. The girls, participating in the game, cast themselves as a socially progressive Greek chorus. “You can’t say ‘crazy,’ ” one interrupts. When Lara describes Pallace’s “preposterous” legs, they protest that she is objectifying her.

In these scenes, the source of Lara’s contentment is sweetly obvious. When Nell laments the celebrity Lara could perhaps have been, she exclaims, “Look at this! Look at the three of you! You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?” The pandemic portions of the book conjure an adult world of trade-offs and compromise, in which family offers abundant recompense for lacklustre Google search results. The girls themselves are delicious creations. Emily is fiery; Maisie, a veterinarian-in-training, is sensible; Nell is intuitive, the most in tune with her mother. She shares Lara’s fanciful streak and sometimes wears lipstick to go cherry picking. Musing about whether to pursue an argument with one of her daughters, Lara thinks, “I will always be afraid of waking up the part of Emily that has long been dormant. I will always be afraid of accidentally breaking something in Nell that is fragile and pure. But Maisie is up for it; no one will ever worry about Maisie.”

In other words, the ingredients have been assembled for a wistful meditation on mothers and daughters learning to handle the seasons of their lives. “Tom Lake” guides Lara to equanimity and closure, mostly by awakening her to the value of the people around her. Here, as in much of Patchett’s work, togetherness compensates for loss; being with others, even if they’re not exactly the others you wanted and you’re not with them in exactly the right way, is a genuine form of flourishing.

But the novel’s alchemical transformation of pain into peace feels, at times, overstated. In “Bel Canto,” gunfire interrupted the harmony Patchett painstakingly built between terrorists and captives. “Tom Lake” softens such dissonance. Lara doesn’t just acquiesce to her second act; she discovers that the convergence of motherhood, lockdown, and fruit harvesting has created “the happiest time of my life.” The interlude, she thinks, is “joy itself.” (Nell’s opinion: “I want to get the hell out of this orchard.”) For Lara, the farm is not an earthly place; its red-and-white fields ripple with magic. Amid a “pointillist’s dream” of fruit trees, she can play all her roles at once, reënacting her glory days at Tom Lake, parenting her grown children, and indulging the maternal prerogative of steering the family narrative. Lara sees the selves she’s shed throughout her life jumbled and reallocated among her daughters. Nell shares her “naturalness” onstage, “an ability to be so transparent it’s impossible to turn your eyes away.” Emily, her most difficult child, she construes as a fugitive piece of her own soul: “No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here.” The farm holds, or has held, or will hold, all the people Lara loves. It even encompasses a graveyard—with tangled daisies, a “pretty iron fence,” and “benevolent shade”—where generations of Joe’s family are buried. The Nelsons “resting beneath the mossy slabs . . . had never wanted to be anywhere else,” Lara thinks, projecting her bliss upon the dead.

“Tom Lake” collects enchanted places, sites of congregation like the lake and the stage, or like Chekhov’s cherry orchard and the town in “Our Town.” Patchett suggests that in these timeless locales, with their renewable springs of ghostly personae, characters can safely warehouse past versions of themselves and others. Or at least that’s the idea. Rather than fear the cemetery, Lara and her kids love it and its promise of “everlasting inclusion.” As a girl, Emily “liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen.” Lara herself “would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh.”

As “Tom Lake” goes on, the determined positivity begins to feel slightly menacing, or at least constrictive. Is Lara really that happy? Or is she hiding inside the myth of her happiness to avoid confronting her daughters’ unhappiness and her own shortcomings as a parent? I was tempted into a paranoid reading of the three Nelson girls, scanning for covert signs of distress. Nell, like her mother, dreams of the stage, but she is stuck wearing sad quarantine lipstick, thumbing through plays in her bedroom at night, and practicing lines with her friends over Zoom. Dependable Maisie is always off to deliver a litter of puppies or tend to a calf with diarrhea. Was she forced to grow up too soon? Meanwhile, Emily declares her intention not to procreate. Her decision is a poignant nod to climate change, but it could also be glossed as a salvo against a controlling parent.

Ultimately, though, the novel endorses Lara’s rosy perspective. The girls gratefully receive the tale of Tom Lake—“I’m not sorry to know,” Maisie assures her mom—and the family draws closer. With cherries harvested and blessings scattered, the cast convenes joyfully in the cemetery. Lara thinks, “There is room up here for all of us.” The scene seems oddly unreal, like plastic flowers on a grave. Yet there’s something subversively wise and self-aware about the book’s investment in its own fantasy. “Tom Lake,” the fiction, seems conscious of its status as a magical place, a locus of gentle make-believe. Even as Patchett validates Lara’s performance of contentment, she appears to know that behind the artifice lies a more complicated truth. The same might be said of the graveyard itself, with its friendly daisies and eternally fulfilled ancestors. Strip away the props: there, perhaps, is Forest Lawn cemetery, in Los Angeles, where Patchett and her father were briefly resurrected into one another’s lives. ♦

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Tom Lake by Ann Patchett review – a lesson in how to kiss and tell

Patchett’s new novel, in which a mother tells her daughters about her early romance with a famous actor, is a gentle but revealing meditation on lost love and destiny

I n This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, an essay from 2011 in which she considers the vicissitudes of contentment, Ann Patchett writes that children have “a real failure of imagination when it comes to thinking of the adults in their lives as having done anything of interest, anything at all, in the time known as before ”. Such a state, she suggests, leaves us ill-prepared for the realisation, sharp but inevitable, that our parents, too, may have their secrets. At best, we’re unnerved, something solid now made to seem suddenly shaky. At worst, we indulge in an outburst of sententiousness, priggish to a fault. We need our parents to be better than us – and if they cannot be that, then at least they should be less exciting.

In her strangely peaceable new novel, Tom Lake , Patchett gives us Lara Nelson and her three adult daughters: Emily, who will one day take over the family cherry farm; Maisie, who is studying to be a vet; and Nell, who hopes to be an actor, as her mother once was. For these girls, however, it is not a failure of imagination that troubles them so much as a surfeit. For most of their lives, they’ve known that Lara once dated Peter Duke, an actor who would later win an Oscar, news that was broken to them ever so casually by their father, Joe, as they watched one of his old films as children. But in the absence of crucial details – up to now, their mother has been frustratingly sketchy – the beautiful, charismatic Duke has colonised their minds, clambering over everything like weeds at the edge of the orchard. They’re fixated on him, these young women, and with their own futures now opening out before them, they demand to know everything. Lara must spill.

Luckily, there is the time for this. Tom Lake is set during the pandemic. Thanks to the lockdown, the Nelson girls are all at home helping with the cherry harvest; Lara’s story, told in daily instalments, will be better than any podcast at easing them through the long, back-breaking days. Patchett’s narrative, then, flips between present-day Michigan, and the same state in 1988, when Lara spent a summer not so far away at Tom Lake, where she starred opposite the young Duke in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town – and, yes, as stories go, this one has pretty much everything, save perhaps for an unreliable narrator (if Lara keeps one important plot twist from her children, her mode so far as we’re concerned is as scrupulous as it is exquisitely controlled). Its subjects include fame, ambition, talent, lost love and the difference between so-called destiny and choice; the young Lara even goes to Hollywood, where she makes a cult movie.

But there’s something else as well. Aren’t her daughters so earnest and so vulnerable? They bruise as easily as ripe fruit. Spreading her memories out before her girls like an old embroidered tablecloth, Lara hopes to show them that those moments in her life when all seemed lost (or won) were not, after all, so definitive. In the end, she thinks to herself, so much is forgotten: “The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else.”

Meryl Streep will read the audio book of Tom Lake , and I can just imagine how she’ll do it, every line delivered in her best Bridges of Madison County voice (different state, I know, but you will catch my meaning). There is something folksy about this novel – a plain-speaking sagacity I occasionally found glib – and it is braided, too, with a ribbon of sentimentality not even its denouement can quite cut (while this particular turn did not shock or even surprise me, it will strike some readers as acidic). I should say also that at least in the beginning, I found the constant interruptions to the story of Duke (the mythology of Duke!) caused by the comings and goings at the Nelson’s cherry orchard very frustrating. Cut to the bit where you have sex with the floppy-haired film star, Lara! I kept thinking – a response not dissimilar to that of her daughters, who often weary of her throat-clearing, her need to circle right back to the beginning of things.

But such frustrations do not last. The reader comes to understand how integral they are to Patchett’s purpose, which has to do in part with the nature of storytelling. She knows exactly what she’s doing, just how much to say or withhold. While I can’t help but hanker for the wilder, more gorgeously outlandish Patchett of Bel Canto and State of Wonder , I also see that in this – a later, quieter book – she is pulling off a trick at least as daring, which is to take the temperature of a whole life, and by doing so, to prioritise happiness over misery, an emotion on which the novel often struggles to thrive. I would tell you there is something epiphanic about Tom Lake , only that adjective won’t do at all, for the understanding comes, not in some soaring climax, but cumulatively, across many moments, each one brimful of the half glimpsed, the almost understood. Lara’s middle age and all it has brought her is not consolatory. Out in that cherry orchard, she will come to see that she has all she ever wanted. But for the reader, it surely is. We can only hope it will be the same way for us, our mistakes and hurts, having first faded to grey, now carefully repurposed as our very best stories.

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Ann Patchett’s latest, ‘Tom Lake,’ reminds us why she’s beloved

The new novel from the author of such books as ‘the dutch house’ and ‘bel canto’ explores love in its many forms.

So many books about love are actually about heartbreak. Ann Patchett’s new novel, “ Tom Lake ,” is not. “Tom Lake” is about romantic love, marital love and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry. Not that a heart is not broken at some point, but it breaks without affecting the remarkable warmth of the book, set in summer’s fullest bloom.

Earlier this year, Patchett received the National Humanities Medal for, among other contributions to the literary world, her ability to put “ into words the beauty, pain, and complexity of human nature .” This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel.

“Tom Lake” revolves around a central love story, one that Lara Kenison tells her three daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, in installments over the long, strange summer of 2020 on the family-run cherry farm in Michigan. It is the story of her affair with a famous actor named Peter Duke, which took place when both were in summer stock at Tom Lake, Mich., when Lara was just 19 years old. The girls have heard parts of it before, but this time they’re getting the full account. Lara starts at the very beginning, when she played Emily in a community theater production of “Our Town,” which led to a brief career in Hollywood and then a reprise of the role of Emily at Tom Lake. Duke, a handsome hunk on the runway to a huge career, was playing Editor Webb, her father.

As did many a mother during the coronavirus years, Lara is enjoying the pandemic-driven return of her girls to their mother’s arms. “All three of our girls are home now. Emily came back to the farm after she graduated from college, while Maisie and Nell, still in school, returned in March.” And while the girls are anxiously following the nightly news, their mother’s feelings about the pandemic are mixed. She can’t “pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.”

Though mothers have been important characters in a couple of Patchett novels (“ The Magician’s Assistant ” comes to mind), “Tom Lake” is her first with a narrator who is a mother — a mother whose maternal role and emotions are at the core of who she is.

This is interesting in light of Patchett’s real-life feelings about motherhood. As she wrote in “There Are No Children Here,” a striking essay from her 2021 collection , “ These Precious Days ,” “Part of not wanting children has always been the certainty that I didn’t have the energy for it, and so I had to make a choice, the choice between children and writing.”

That’s one of the nice things about fiction writing, though — there’s plenty of opportunity to become someone else, make different choices and explore a different life, in this case someone with three beloved daughters. “Emily is tall like her father, strong enough to hoist full lugs all day long. Maisie is smaller than her older sister, though by no means small, and her curls give her extra stature. Nell is like me, or Nell is like I was. It’s as if the genetic material from which these girls were made diminished with every effort, so that the eldest daughter is strapping and the middle is middling and the youngest is a wisp.”

Knowing Patchett’s personal history with motherhood makes the fullness of the maternal feelings she imagines for Lara Kenison particularly poignant. In one beautiful passage, Lara comforts her youngest, Nell: “I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her. No one sees us but the swallows looping overhead. She puts her arms around my waist and we stand there, just like that, casting a single shadow across the grass.”

A single shadow across the grass — as if one’s child could be part of you again, the way they were in the first place.

Though Lara tells her husband, Joe, that she’s leaving out “the good parts” from this version of the tale — “By which you mean sex,” says Joe — there’s no way to tell the story without giving a general sense of the heat between Peter Duke and Lara, so hot that it crept into their portrayal of father and daughter onstage.

The two of them become half of a foursome when Peter’s tennis-pro brother, Sebastian, begins dating Pallas, a Black dancer from the company, and eventually things get complicated. And things get broken. And Peter and Lara are shot out the other side of their headlong romance, into their individual futures.

It’s interesting to think about “Tom Lake” alongside “ Bel Canto ,” the prizewinning 2001 novel that was Patchett’s breakout. From a distance they seem so different, one about a hostage situation in South America complete with guns and violence, and the other about a family on a farm in Michigan. Except that because of the pandemic, the family is also in a kind of hostage situation — a suspension of ordinary life. And both stories are fundamentally about how love begins, and what happens to it after that.

Ann Patchett’s wisdom about love has run though all of her novels and nonfiction books, including the great “ Truth and Beauty ” and “ This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage .” As soon as you finish “Tom Lake,” you should go back and read them all.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “ The Weekly Reader ,” is the author of numerous books, including “ First Comes Love ” and “ The Big Book of the Dead .”

by Ann Patchett

Harper. 330 pp. $30

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‘Tom Lake’ Finds Ann Patchett in a Chekhovian Mood

This time the celebrated novelist spins the cozy tale of a former actress, her three daughters and their rueful memories. There’s a cherry orchard, too.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

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Are you in possession of a hammock? A creaky old porch swing? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will situate you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it put your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you amble around listening to Meryl Streep read the audio version.

This author is such a decorated and beloved figure in American letters — spinning out novels , memoirs and essays like so many multicolored silks; opening an independent bookstore in Nashville to fight the Amazon anaconda; even helping care for Tom Hanks’s cancer-stricken personal assistant — that I sometimes think of her as Aunt Patchett.

Patchett’s actual family of origin was complicated, as she made explicit after the 2016 publication of the semi-autobiographical “ Commonwealth .” “ The Dutch House ” (2019), which had a wicked stepmother, did not stray far from the idea that living with relatives can be messy and hellish.

With “Tom Lake,” she treats us — and perhaps herself — to a vision of a family beautifully, bucolically simple: nuclear, in its pre-bomb meaning.

Like some guardian angel in the sky, Anton Chekhov hovers over this story, which features three sisters in their 20s and is set on their parents’ cherry orchard (albeit in northern Michigan during the recent pandemic, not the tuberculosis- torn Russian provinces). But Thornton Wilder is driving the tractor.

Sequestered not unhappily in lockdown, the sisters’ mother, Lara (she dropped a “u” after reading “Doctor Zhivago”), is telling them, after tiring days in the field, about her long-ago, short-lived career as an actress, whose highlight was starring as Emily Gibbs , the tragic heroine of Wilder’s enduringly popular piece of Americana, “Our Town.”

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

by Ann Patchett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2023

Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists.

It’s time to harvest the cherries from their Michigan orchard, but the pandemic means that Joe Nelson; his wife, Lara; and their daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, must pick all the fruit themselves.

To lighten the lengthy, grueling workdays, and prompted by the recent death of world-famous actor Peter Duke, the girls press Lara to tell them about her romance with Duke at Tom Lake, a summer stock company in Michigan, and her decision to give up acting after one big movie role. Lara’s reminiscences, peppered by feisty comments from her daughters and periodic appearances by her gentle, steadfast husband, provide the foundation for Patchett’s moving portrait of a woman looking back at a formative period in her life and sharing some—but only some—of it with her children. Duke flashes across her recollections as a wildly talented, nakedly ambitious, and extremely crazy young man clearly headed for stardom, but the real interest in this portion of the novel lies in Patchett’s delicate delineation of Lara’s dawning realization that, fine as she is as Emily in Our Town , she has a limited talent and lacks the drive that propels Duke and her friend and understudy Pallas. The fact that Pallas, who's Black, doesn’t get the break that Duke does is one strand in Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web, which also enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice. Lara’s daughters are standouts among the sharply dawn characterizations: once-volatile Emily, now settled down to be the heir apparent to the farm; no-nonsense veterinarian-in-training Maisie; and Nell, the aspiring actor and unerring observer who anticipates every turn in her mother’s tale. Patchett expertly handles her layered plot, embedding one charming revelation and one brutal (but in retrospect inevitable) betrayal into a dual narrative that deftly maintains readers’ interest in both the past and present action. These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023

ISBN: 9780063327528

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

Pulitzer Prize Winner

DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Barbara Kingsolver

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‘Tom Lake’ Review: Ann Patchett’s Latest Novel Is A Warm Hug

Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake” may very well be the first pandemic novel that anyone actually likes. Set among the cherry trees of northern Michigan in the summer of 2020, narrator and protagonist Lara tells her three 20-something-aged daughters a story of the time she dated a movie star named Peter Duke — while avoiding any hint of cringe. Whether it’s Patchett’s ever-prodigious touch or the story’s determined wholesomeness, her ninth novel is reflective and mellow, though by no means prudish — it recounts a hot summer fling, after all. Most of all, it’s rich with the kind of devastatingly real depictions of humanity that readers have come to expect from Patchett.

While in the present day, Lara and her family deal with the daily hard work of the cherry farm (short a few hands because of the pandemic), the young, 24-year-old Lara in her story-within-a-story has an irritatingly perfect life. Discovered by a producer at a high school production of “Our Town,” she goes on to star in a movie, and then to perform in “Our Town” again during summer stock at the eponymous Tom Lake. It’s there that she meets Duke, a then-unknown actor who sweeps her off her feet within the first hour. It’s one of those loves that flares bright but short, and while it yanks the reader along in whirlwind fashion, the mature Lara and her family are the ones who provide the novel’s layers of reflective insight.

Lara’s daughter Emily, named after the character her mother played in “Our Town,” has the frightening intensity of strong-willed eldest daughters, and Lara’s memories of Emily’s years of teenage “hormonal rage” paint a complex and heartbreaking portrait of parent-child relations. Though becoming convinced that your favorite movie star is your true biological father in a fit of delusion might not be a universal teenage experience, the hurt that Emily causes her parents and family is still utterly piercing. Even years later, Lara admits that she is “still somewhat afraid of her.”

Furthermore, it’s through Nell, the youngest and only daughter who inherited Lara’s desire for the stage, that the reader comprehends the significance of a central event in Lara’s story: When she ruptures her Achilles tendon midway through the run of “Our Town.” Although the injury itself isn’t career-ending, this marks the beginning of Lara’s disillusionment with the industry (and with Duke) and the end of her acting career. “While her sisters stare uncomprehending, Nell sobs against [her mother’s] chest,” understanding, as the only other performer in the family, that Lara didn’t go on stage again that summer. It’s an absolutely devastating moment, made even more poignant by Nell’s parallel grief. While Lara has ended her career — and mostly by choice — young Nell, who wants it so badly, has yet to begin. Even worse, she’s losing precious time to the pandemic while she is “beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth.” In these moments, one thinks Patchett must have lived a thousand lives to understand where the keystones of human experience and emotion lie, and then to describe them so adeptly, so accurately.

Though Patchett gets this crucial moment just right, there are moments where the novel falters. Emily voices some climate anxieties in a rather sudden and jarring way, and the girls protest their parents’ occasionally “un-woke” habits in lines that feel added-on. Attempts to comment on race concern Pallace, Lara’s understudy and best friend at Tom Lake, who is seemingly the only Black character in the book. The fact that Pallace ostensibly doesn’t make it to Hollywood, unlike Duke and Lara (who are both white), seems a realistic and quiet nod to the realities of theater — yet it still feels like a half-baked attempt to talk about race.

“Tom Lake” manages to feel both wandering and organic, while maintaining a neatly progressing arc of realizations. But it’s almost too neat: The reader slowly starts to make connections — recognizing the origins of each daughter’s name, recognizing their father, and their home, all within Lara’s dream-like story. Her husband, too, is miraculously never uncomfortable with this deep dive into his wife’s past love. But what kind of pandemic novel would it be if it wasn’t a little escapist? In fact, perhaps what makes this novel so agreeable despite being set in 2020 is that it captures not just the small, hidden, somewhat guilty pleasures of being trapped at home with family, but also both narrates and embodies the longing for escapism — for stories of levity, happiness, and joy.

Though it doesn’t shy from revealing moments of human suffering and sorrow, “Tom Lake” ultimately chooses cheeriness and heart, leaving readers feeling snug and content.

—Staff writer Sara Komatsu can be reached at [email protected] .

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Reviews of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

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by Ann Patchett

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Book summary.

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.

That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability. The play's director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother's friend and State Farm agent. That's how I was wrangled in, through my grandmother, and Veronica was wrangled because we did pretty much everything together. Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town . We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the "Star-Spangled Banner." It spoke to us, made us feel special and seen. Mr. Martin predicted a large turnout for the auditions, which explained why he needed use of the school gym for the day. The community theater production had nothing to do with our high school, but seeing as how Mr. Martin was also the principal's insurance agent and very likely his friend, the request was granted. Ours was that kind of town. We arrived with our travel mugs of coffee and thick ...

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I couldn't believe how easy it was to get into the book and absorbed in Lara's story. As a writer myself, I took a lot of notes about Patchett's style here. Rather than crafting shimmering passages that call attention to her skill, Patchett's gift is to make herself disappear so we can better connect with the characters. The events of Lara's life flow perfectly together, which makes it exciting when we learn how she goes from swimming with a movie star to owning a cherry orchard with a husband and kids. Also, that's really how life is: we never know if a single moment will turn out to be important or not, or when we'll see someone for the last time, or how what we will come to learn about them in future will change how we see the past... continued

(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin ).

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Thornton wilder (1897-1975) and our town.

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How Ann Patchett puts her ‘moral core’ into her novels

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On the Shelf

By Ann Patchett Harper: 320 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Ann Patchett needs no introduction. She might be America’s favorite novelist, with books that sell instantly and forever: “ Bel Canto ,” “ State of Wonder ,” “ Commonwealth ,” “The Dutch House.” Her latest, “ Tom Lake ,” is out next week and will surely do the same.

She writes with deep attention to our country’s changing culture while never taking her eye off narrative. Each book uses a traditional storytelling structure — lyrics, midrash , folk tales — while pushing at the edges of what a form can contain, cramming it with modern human concerns, triumphs and tragedies.

But perhaps Patchett does need a reintroduction, because along with elevating both the mundane and the magical into literary fiction, she’s become one of America’s most important independent booksellers. The owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Patchett is at the forefront of an industry plagued by a sense of disconnection from its audience. She has put her money, energy and imagination into not just books and literature but also ideas and community. So it makes perfect sense that, as she spoke via Zoom from her Nashville home, the author would start out explaining “Tom Lake” through her ideas about community.

Ann Patchett on why she isn’t doing a conventional book tour — possibly ever again

Bestselling author Ann Patchett talks about book tours, Tom Hanks and ‘These Precious Days,’ her new book of essays.

Nov. 23, 2021

“I grew up here and moved away, but now people want to live in Nashville , and it just makes no sense to me,” Patchett says. “But I think a lot about the young people who work in the bookstore, and what they have to deal with. I’m not their mother, but being around them reminds me of things that I was interested in at that time in my life, which were questions like, ‘Can I afford to go out to dinner? What time do you make a long-distance call home?’”

But times, like telephone data plans, have changed. “These young people now are worrying about climate crisis and trans rights and this whole slew of things that never entered my mind when I was in my 20s. I knew people then who had depression, but not anxiety. Now I see how much time and energy it takes up in a young person’s life.”

“Tom Lake,” Patchett’s ninth novel, begins with the anxiety of young people, as Lara and Joe Nelson face the COVID pandemic with all three of their daughters back home at their Michigan fruit farm. This three-sistered orchard setting deliberately calls Anton Chekhov to mind, but Patchett’s bigger literary fish to fry is the text she calls her foundation, Thornton Wilder’s “ Our Town .” Lara famously portrayed “Our Town’s” Emily years back; moreover, a story she tells her family about her drama years provides both the novel’s framing device and a Wilder-esque lesson in paying attention to what matters most.

Maisie, Emily and Nell “are stuck at home in the way we used to be stuck at home ,” says Patchett, “and while they have plenty of physical labor to do, they can’t go outside of the farm, and they have to rely on storytelling for their entertainment.”

It’s a good fit for Patchett, because writing about people cut off from the world is “my wheelhouse. No matter how hard I try not to do that, I get to the end of the book, whether it’s ‘Patron Saint of Liars’ or ‘State of Wonder,’ and I’m like, hey, look, I did the thing again.”

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Patchett decided to limit her characters’ access to communication — perhaps because she limits her own access. “I have a flip phone, but I only use it when I travel,” she says. “I’m not on any social media. How do you keep a plot going when you have a device in someone’s hand that just constantly reveals and connects people? So early on, Lara asks her daughters to just put their phones down.”

Storytelling becomes the family’s mainstay — specifically Lara’s story about her long-ago romance with a now-famous actor named Peter Duke. The most fascinating thing about Patchett’s own story is that while she has written often about families and children, she does not have children of her own.

“Somehow I really understood when I was a kid that I couldn’t be the solitary creature that I am and have another living being with me 24/7,” she says. “I would have loved children and I probably would have been really good at parenting. I am an even-keeled, loving person with great domestic skills. And yet I know I would not have been able to limit either side of my life.”

She mentions that her colleague Lauren Groff has a contract with her husband forbidding contact with the family until late afternoon. “If I’d known her when I was younger, Lauren Groff’s method could have changed my life,” Patchett says. “I am completely at peace with my life as it is now and I don’t second-guess myself one bit, but I can imagine it could have been different without believing that there was only one path.”

The path not taken is very much at the heart of “Tom Lake.” The Nelson daughters find it hard to believe anyone would have passed up the chance to be tied to a movie star, perhaps become a movie star herself. “The choices she has made are mystifying to them, even though they can see her happiness,” she says. “And Lara does love her life. She loves that farm. She loves Joe, and the family they have made. One of her reasons for telling the story is so that maybe this time her girls will see that the quiet deep thing that comes later is so much better.”

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She pauses to consider her own statement. “I really believe that,” she says. “I’ve been married for 29 years, and I’m happily married. It’s impossible not to write about what matters to you. You can make up people all day long, but they still have your moral core in a way — or they’re working against it.”

Patchett says a recent interviewer who was 24, “Maisie’s age,” asked her why she kept all the important themes — the pandemic, racism, climate change, reproductive rights — in the background of her work. “I told her: Because that’s where it is. No matter how much these things overwhelm and terrify us, we get up and go to work and see our friends and love the people we love and make food and vacuum and feed the dog. It’s unsustainable to take all of the things that terrify us and keep them in the front.”

Call it realism; it might also be Patchett’s secret recipe for managing the modern world.

Patrick is a freelance critic, podcaster and author of the memoir “Life B.”

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Review: ‘Tom Lake’ is Ann Patchett at her best

August 19, 2023 at 12:00 p.m.

by Hamilton Cain / Chapter16.org

"TOM LAKE: A NOVEL" by Ann Patchett (Harper, 320 pages, $30).

Published four years ago, Ann Patchett's "The Dutch House" was that rara avis: a deftly crafted Pulitzer Prize finalist that graced the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. (In 2021 she followed up with a superb collection of essays, "These Precious Days.") Her books move with a gentle, assured rhythm, evoking authentic nostalgia that veers clear of sentimentality while conducting little experiments of narrative subversion beneath placid surfaces. Amid seismic tensions she layers beautiful chapter on beautiful chapter; no other American writer pulls this off with such finesse. Quotidian lives, she suggests, are often the most radical.

Her new novel, "Tom Lake," is Patchett at her best. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, her protagonist and narrator, Lara Kenison, 57, hunkers down with her husband, Joe, on their fruit farm in northern Michigan. Their three grown daughters — Emily, an agriculturalist who works the property with her fiancé; Maisie, a veterinarian-in-training; and Nell, an artsy undergraduate — have gathered to wait out the plague and help with the cherry harvest in the meantime.

In her youth, Lara pursued a career as an actress, reprising the role of Emily in "Our Town," from a walk-on performance in her native New Hampshire to summer stock in the bucolic enclave of Tom Lake, which brought her to Michigan. (Along the way she did stints in Los Angeles and New York, auditioning for an off-Broadway production starring the late Spalding Gray, but those venues were more stations of the cross than artistic affirmations.) Her daughters are enthralled by their mother's thespian past, and as they roam the groves, picking "sweets" and "tarts," she tells the tale in full.

Or does she? Lara gets caught up in her memories and her daughters' enthusiasm, but she's careful to withhold crucial information. Although he's largely offstage, tending to the farm, Joe's more complicit than he lets on.

Patchett painstakingly embroiders her characters: "Emily is tall like her father, strong enough to hoist full lugs all day long. Maisie is smaller than her older sister, though by no means small, and her curls gave her extra stature. Nell is like me, or Nell is like I was. It's as if the genetic material from which these girls were made diminished with every effort, so that the eldest daughter is strapping and the middle is middling and the youngest is a wisp. They might as well have been three birds. I flick away a tiny green inchworm."

Note that subtle flick, how the gesture grounds Lara's insights amid the cherry trees. Bit by bit Lara relates her long-ago romance at Tom Lake when, as a 24-year-old, she shared the spotlight and a bed with Peter Duke, a handsome, now-famous movie star. Her daughters want to know everything.

The trope of plays and musicals are fashionable in our contemporary literature, as leading authors — Rebecca Makkai, Mona Awad and Susan Choi among them — tap our fascination with theater. Patchett captures the magic as well. Lara and Peter are cast in both "Our Town" and "Fool for Love," and the plots thicken as the actors circle around each other, sparks flying in and out of rehearsals. Patchett's wordplay delights: "The actual stage manager, as opposed to the actor playing the Stage Manager, sat with the assistant stage manager," Lara observes. "I waved to them collectively, and they waved back."

Many (most?) novelists delve into familial frictions and twisted roads to maturity, but Patchett's depictions of close relationships open up into sprawling murals, posing questions about the salience of art and intimacy in our troubled age. She counterposes Lara's secret history with the stresses of quarantine.

Lara recognizes her younger, more vulnerable self in her tenderhearted daughter: "Just like that Nell is crying and sobbing, a fierce storm blown up out of nowhere. She turns her back on Maisie and Emily in shame and presses her face against my breastbone. ... She has lost these months to the pandemic, being stuck on the farm with no idea how much longer she will have to stay. ... But really, she is crying for me. While her sisters stand and stare in utter bafflement, Nell the Mentalist has snapped all the pieces together.

Pain, Patchett implies, is the gateway to enlightenment, but "Tom Lake" teems with various and sundry charms and her bone-deep optimism. Another selling point: She nails the details, from the business of stoned fruits in this book to Philadelphia's architectural marvels in "The Dutch House" and so on. She's not content with a fresh slant on parent-child relationships; she offers up tutorials on topics we didn't know we needed. Across her oeuvre, Patchett has proven herself a generous, meticulous mentor, and "Tom Lake" is one of this year's triumphs.

For more local book coverage, visit Chapter16.org , an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

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Tom Lake: A Reese's Book Club Pick

This is a story of love for family, of past passions and people once loved, and their continuing influence on the present. With Ann Patchett’s wit and wryness finely tuned, Tom Lake is the perfect book for a summer weekend read.

Description

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

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.

About the Author

Ann Patchett  is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Tim es bestselling Tom Lake , works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel  The Dutch House  was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and  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. Visit her at annpatchett.com.

Praise for Tom Lake: A Reese's Book Club Pick

" Tom Lake is a book to be savored—the once-in-a-blue-moon type." — San Francisco Chronicle

“A swoony, luminous reminder about the endurance of love and happiness in a broken world.” — Oprah Daily

“A tender, absorbing tale about becoming who we are.” — People

"A searching reflection on the relationships between theater and life, romance and realism, Tom Lake is perhaps Patchett’s finest novel yet.” — Boston Globe

" Tom Lake is about romantic love, marital love and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry. . . . This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel." — Washington Post

"Wise. Beautiful. With an elegant soft touch….Brilliant, of course.” — Good Morning America

“A quiet and reassuring book…highly conscious of…[the] human failure to appreciate the little things.”  — New York Times

"One of our greatest living chroniclers of love and marriage—and its resounding impacts over generations—is back this summer … Expect wonder; Patchett always delivers." — Elle

"The perfect summer novel." — The Atlantic

"Tom Lake is about love in all its many forms. But it is also about death and the ephemeral and how everything goes by so damned fast. It is an elegy of sorts but also a promise that there will be magic no matter what.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

"Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web…enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice….These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming. Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists." — Kirkus Reviews   (starred review)

"As this spellbinding and incisive novel unspools, Patchett brings every turn of mind and every setting to glorious, vibrant life, gracefully contrasting the dazzle of the ephemeral with the gravitas of the timeless, perceiving in cherries sweet and tart reflections of love and loss.” — Booklist (starred review)

"Patchett is at the top of her game." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Patchett is a writer of enormous warmth.” — Wall Street Journal

"A compelling narrative about the secret lives of parents—and how to find happiness in the midst of a long life.” — Time

"[A] poignant novel from Ann Patchett, caring as ever." — Vanity Fair

" Tom Lake …[takes] its time to marvel over the quiet drama of ordinary living: a strong marriage, a loving family, a place to gather at the end of the day.” — Houston Chronicle

"Tom Lake is a beautiful, stirring book that sneaks up on you and makes a deep impression, partly because you’re left asking yourself: “What have I just read?” The moment I finished it, I wanted to go back and start again." — Sunday Times (London)

" Tom Lake is a warm, funny book about kind people who do the best they can." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Patchett] writes with deep attention to our country’s changing culture while never taking her eye off narrative. Each book uses a traditional storytelling structure — lyrics, midrash, folk tales — while pushing at the edges of what a form can contain, cramming it with modern human concerns, triumphs and tragedies.” — Los Angeles Times

“Who is better, more nuanced, or more surprising on matters of love and family than Patchett?. . . . [A] heady voyage into the past, with a delicately observed story that is also constantly shifting the ground beneath our feet." — Literary Hub

"Subversively wise and self-aware." — New Yorker

"Fans of  The Dutch House  and  Commonwealth  will be more than satisfied with Ann Patchett's latest novelistic exploration of love and family dynamics." — Harper’s Bazaar

"Patchett's prose is elegant, her wit abundant, her sense of family dynamics and the complexities of love subtle and insightful. Tom Lake is an enthralling story." — Tampa Bay Times

"Across her oeuvre Patchett has proven herself a generous, meticulous mentor, and Tom Lake is one of this year’s triumphs.” — Chapter 16

"Patchett, beloved bookseller and chronicler of people thrown together in patched families and hostage situations, turns her attention to love — youthful, marital, fleeting, enduring." — NPR

“Meryl Streep…is ideal for narrating Tom Lake …. Streep delivers with her signature whimsy, her cadence lilting from wide-eyed innocence to winking wisdom, blurring the nostalgia for small-town Americana with dashes of big-city dreams." — New York Times Book Review

"Tom Lake is Ann Patchett’s best novel." — Hudson Review

"With her latest novel, Patchett is unabashedly Chekhovian…. If you’re so inclined, Meryl Streep narrates the audiobook, which allows you to savor every word as only a consummate actor like Streep can deliver them.” — Broadway Direct

"Intelligent, poignant,…absorbing….It channels great literature…[and] showcases storytelling expertise." — Washington Examiner

“Best of all in my reading experience this year was Ann Patchett's  Tom Lake ….It's a beautiful, loving story. And its echoes of  Our Town  are spot on.” — Daily Kos

"Reading the book feels, deliciously, like slipping into 'Our Town' and having a conversation with it; it’s both tribute to the play and a moving story of its own." — Seattle Times

"Patchett is a consummate storyteller whose fluid, naturalistic writing style makes reading her novels an effortless journey…. Tom Lake does not disappoint." — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Ahh…Ann Patchett has a new read and we couldn’t be happier….It’s cozy, and feel-good, and we recommend reading with a bowl of cherries.” — The Skimm

"This rich and subtle tale is infused with insight into love, loss and the power of making the right decisions." — Woman & Home (UK)

"Patchett celebrates not just the smallest events of our lives, but “small” lives themselves." — Financial Times

"A new Ann Patchett novel is always cause for celebration... and Tom lake could be one of her best." — inews

“Patchett masterfully weaves an evocative story of love, hope, and familial bonds, offering a profound meditation on finding happiness amid life’s uncertainties.” — BookBub

“[This] quiet novel awakens gratitude for life’s lessons.” — Christian Science Monitor

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Tom Lake: A Reese's Book Club Pick Hardcover – August 1, 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

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

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.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date August 1, 2023
• Dimensions 6 x 1.05 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 006332752X
• ISBN-13 978-0063327528
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

" Tom Lake is a book to be savored—the once-in-a-blue-moon type." — San Francisco Chronicle

“A swoony, luminous reminder about the endurance of love and happiness in a broken world.” — Oprah Daily

“A tender, absorbing tale about becoming who we are.” — People

"A searching reflection on the relationships between theater and life, romance and realism, Tom Lake is perhaps Patchett’s finest novel yet.” — Boston Globe

" Tom Lake is about romantic love, marital love and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry. . . . This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel." — Washington Post

"Wise. Beautiful. With an elegant soft touch….Brilliant, of course.” — Good Morning America

“A quiet and reassuring book…highly conscious of…[the] human failure to appreciate the little things.”  — New York Times

"One of our greatest living chroniclers of love and marriage—and its resounding impacts over generations—is back this summer … Expect wonder; Patchett always delivers." — Elle

"The perfect summer novel." — The Atlantic

"Tom Lake is about love in all its many forms. But it is also about death and the ephemeral and how everything goes by so damned fast. It is an elegy of sorts but also a promise that there will be magic no matter what.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

"Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web…enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice….These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming. Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists." — Kirkus Reviews   (starred review)

"As this spellbinding and incisive novel unspools, Patchett brings every turn of mind and every setting to glorious, vibrant life, gracefully contrasting the dazzle of the ephemeral with the gravitas of the timeless, perceiving in cherries sweet and tart reflections of love and loss.” — Booklist (starred review)

"Patchett is at the top of her game." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Patchett is a writer of enormous warmth.” — Wall Street Journal

"A compelling narrative about the secret lives of parents—and how to find happiness in the midst of a long life.” — Time

"[A] poignant novel from Ann Patchett, caring as ever." — Vanity Fair

" Tom Lake …[takes] its time to marvel over the quiet drama of ordinary living: a strong marriage, a loving family, a place to gather at the end of the day.” — Houston Chronicle

"Tom Lake is a beautiful, stirring book that sneaks up on you and makes a deep impression, partly because you’re left asking yourself: “What have I just read?” The moment I finished it, I wanted to go back and start again." — Sunday Times (London)

" Tom Lake is a warm, funny book about kind people who do the best they can." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Patchett] writes with deep attention to our country’s changing culture while never taking her eye off narrative. Each book uses a traditional storytelling structure — lyrics, midrash, folk tales — while pushing at the edges of what a form can contain, cramming it with modern human concerns, triumphs and tragedies.” — Los Angeles Times

“Who is better, more nuanced, or more surprising on matters of love and family than Patchett?. . . . [A] heady voyage into the past, with a delicately observed story that is also constantly shifting the ground beneath our feet." — Literary Hub

"Subversively wise and self-aware." — New Yorker

"Fans of  The Dutch House  and  Commonwealth  will be more than satisfied with Ann Patchett's latest novelistic exploration of love and family dynamics." — Harper’s Bazaar

"Patchett's prose is elegant, her wit abundant, her sense of family dynamics and the complexities of love subtle and insightful. Tom Lake is an enthralling story." — Tampa Bay Times

"Across her oeuvre Patchett has proven herself a generous, meticulous mentor, and Tom Lake is one of this year’s triumphs.” — Chapter 16

"Patchett, beloved bookseller and chronicler of people thrown together in patched families and hostage situations, turns her attention to love — youthful, marital, fleeting, enduring." — NPR

“Meryl Streep…is ideal for narrating Tom Lake …. Streep delivers with her signature whimsy, her cadence lilting from wide-eyed innocence to winking wisdom, blurring the nostalgia for small-town Americana with dashes of big-city dreams." — New York Times Book Review

"Tom Lake is Ann Patchett’s best novel." — Hudson Review

"With her latest novel, Patchett is unabashedly Chekhovian…. If you’re so inclined, Meryl Streep narrates the audiobook, which allows you to savor every word as only a consummate actor like Streep can deliver them.” — Broadway Direct

"Intelligent, poignant,…absorbing….It channels great literature…[and] showcases storytelling expertise." — Washington Examiner

“Best of all in my reading experience this year was Ann Patchett's  Tom Lake ….It's a beautiful, loving story. And its echoes of  Our Town  are spot on.” — Daily Kos

"Reading the book feels, deliciously, like slipping into 'Our Town' and having a conversation with it; it’s both tribute to the play and a moving story of its own." — Seattle Times

"Patchett is a consummate storyteller whose fluid, naturalistic writing style makes reading her novels an effortless journey…. Tom Lake does not disappoint." — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Ahh…Ann Patchett has a new read and we couldn’t be happier….It’s cozy, and feel-good, and we recommend reading with a bowl of cherries.” — The Skimm

"This rich and subtle tale is infused with insight into love, loss and the power of making the right decisions." — Woman & Home (UK)

"Patchett celebrates not just the smallest events of our lives, but “small” lives themselves." — Financial Times

"A new Ann Patchett novel is always cause for celebration... and Tom lake could be one of her best." — inews

“Patchett masterfully weaves an evocative story of love, hope, and familial bonds, offering a profound meditation on finding happiness amid life’s uncertainties.” — BookBub

“[This] quiet novel awakens gratitude for life’s lessons.” — Christian Science Monitor

About the Author

Ann Patchett  is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Tim es bestselling Tom Lake , works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel  The Dutch House  was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and  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. Visit her at annpatchett.com.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First Ed edition (August 1, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006332752X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063327528
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.13 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.05 x 9 inches
• #27 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
• #32 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #95 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Ann patchett.

Ann Patchett is the author of six novels, including Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She writes for the New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, the Financial Times, the Paris Review and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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7 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Writers writing about writers writing: It all gets a little hall-of-mirrors, sure, but that’s literary criticism for you. This week we recommend three books that look back at earlier eras of writing, from Marilynne Robinson’s luminous reflection on the Book of Genesis to Ramie Targoff’s survey of women writing in the 16th and 17th centuries to Tricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice.

Also up: an elegy for peasants and their way of life, and, in fiction, an Icelandic novel about an amnesiac, a British novel about a bride-to-be re-evaluating her life choices, and a South Korean story collection that tends toward the otherworldly. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance Ramie Targoff

Targoff’s rich excavation of writers of the 16th and early 17th centuries introduces not just four women but their work: fine poetry, ingenious translation, elegant diaries, subversive drama. Targoff brings a historian’s scope and a critic’s eye to her subject, and manages to make the result both enlightening and pleasurable.

“Fascinating. ... Targoff’s intent is to scrape away the layer of literary obscurity from Shakespeare’s sisters and present the pentimento as transcendent survivors. Their work indeed lives on.”

From Tina Brown’s review

Knopf | $33

READING GENESIS Marilynne Robinson

To read the first book of the Bible in Robinson’s company is a thrill. With exacting, benevolent intelligence, the prizewinning author of “Housekeeping,” “Gilead” and other novels (along with several previous works of nonfiction) brings marvelously to life this ancient chronicle of human longing, vice and virtue, and the awed intimations of divinity that inspired it.

“Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts, which is also one of the foundations of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s mind and faith.”

From Francis Spufford’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $29

PIGLET Lottie Hazell

Two weeks before her wedding, a young woman learns of her betrothed’s betrayal. She decides to proceed as planned — but will she be able to? Hazell’s debut novel is a tantalizing layer cake of horror, romance (sort of) and timely questions about the power of appetite.

“If I owned a bookstore, I’d hand-sell ‘Piglet’ to everyone. … Hazell’s prose is as tart and icy as lemon sorbet; her sentences are whipcord taut, drum tight.”

From Jennifer Weiner’s review

Holt | $27.99

THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture Tricia Romano

Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice tracks its rise from a local New York paper to a muckraking powerhouse with national influence. Interviews with former staff members, admirers and a killer’s row of cultural critics capture the anarchic, audacious spirit of America’s most important alternative weekly.

“A well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip. … May be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read.”

From Dwight Garner’s review

PublicAffairs | $35

REMEMBERING PEASANTS: A Personal History of a Vanished World Patrick Joyce

Most of the people who have lived on this planet since the invention of agriculture have been what we now call peasants. And yet, as Joyce writes in his sensitive rumination on agricultural laborers, it’s a state of being that’s always been treated with a total lack of respect. While Joyce, a historian, addresses most of Europe in this sweeping study, his investment is particular: In the process, he paints a moving portrait of his own family.

A “moving and sensitive rumination on the historic fate of these earthbound people. … Joyce’s study is an elegy for a way of life, and a way of understanding the world.”

From Fintan O’Toole’s review

Scribner | $30

YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS Jon Kalman Stefansson

An amnesiac pieces together his identity from strangers’ stories in this peripatetic Icelandic novel, translated by Philip Roughton, which unfolds from an awakening in a small rural church into a rich history of a whole community. Stefansson uses the drama and comedy of everyday lives to dive into a broad range of topics: philosophy, music, faith and even the science of earthworms.

“Elemental nature and human tragedy are equally present. … Each story could stand on its own; one of the pleasures of the novel is the slow revelation of their connections.”

From Daniel Mason’s review

Biblioasis | Paperback, $19.95

YOUR UTOPIA: Stories Bora Chung

Chung’s new story collection, translated by Anton Hur, takes readers to otherworldly places and fantastical scenarios — ranging from an immortality research clinic to a version of Earth ravaged by a virus that causes cannibalism — to explore the very real quandaries we face as humans today.

“Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision.”

From Alexandra Kleeman’s review

Algonquin Books | Paperback, $18.99

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