Me last year: “All I want for Christmas is … Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.”
I am a massive Patchett fan. Her novels State of Wonder (about a mysterious research project deep in the Amazon) and Commonwealth (a family saga) are particularly incredible.
Tom Lake has a simple premise. Cherry farmer, wife, and mother, Lara, is bowing to pressure from her three grown daughters to tell them the story of Peter Duke – a bona fide movie star whom Lara, a one-time actor, once dated. Thrown together by the pandemic, the daughters and their parents are picking cherries all day on the family farm, and Lara is relishing the closeness. What she’s not enjoying as much is the trip down memory lane to her short-lived acting career and her intense love affair with Duke.
Like most Patchett novels, the significance of the story lies more in what’s not said, playing out in the natural beauty of the characters’ surroundings and the gentle but effective metaphors. Patchett has such a knack for subtle writing – her prose is effortless: dreamy but with searing emotional intensity.
Tom Lake is a nostalgia-drenched dream about all kinds of love, what we see as success, and the secrets we keep. The word that came to my mind when I closed 2025’s first fiction read was this: gorgeous.
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