TOM LAKE, by Ann Patchett

In August 2024 we are reading Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett.

We will hold the book club in our usual spot, the Piano Craft Gallery (http://pianocraftgallery.com) in Boston's South End. The doors will open at 6:45. Bring whatever you would like to share (optional). I'm planning to provide a few bottles of wine and some appetizers. We'll socialize 6:45-7:15 (-ish), then talk about the book starting around 7:15. We can stay as long as we like!

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK, READ BY MERYL STREEP

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.

Hope to see you there!
Diane