If you thought Ann Patchett snagging Tom Hanks to read the audiobook of her 2019 novel The Dutch House was a coup, for her ninth novel she has lured Meryl Streep into the recording booth. Tom Lake sees a family brought together during the 2020 pandemic on a farm in Michigan. As Lara’s three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, pitch in and help with the annual cherry harvest, they insistently quiz their mother about her mysterious youth.
Lara, they learn, once had ambitions to become an actor, and played Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a theatre on the edge of a lake. During an idyllic summer, she had an intense romance with her leading man, Peter Duke, with the pair spending all their time rehearsing or swimming in the lake: “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat,” Lara recalls. But she quit acting soon after, had a family and threw herself into small-town life; Peter, meanwhile, became an Oscar-winning film star who died prematurely.
Patchett has made her name unpicking complex family dynamics and how people respond to trauma. In Tom Lake, those themes are softened as she interrogates ideas around choice and the roads not taken. Streep’s narration is nuanced and thoughtful as it moves between wistful memories of Lara’s past (she keeps the more colourful parts of her story from her daughters) and the gentle melancholy of her present. For Lara, to look back is to confront old disappointments while cherishing all that she has now.
• Tom Lake is available via Bloomsbury, 11hr 22min
Further listening
Glory
NoViolet Bulawayo, Penguin Audio, 16hr 10min
Chipo Chung reads this post-colonial allegory, inspired by Orwell’s Animal Farm, set in the fictional African nation of Jidada, where a tyrant is ousted from power.
Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult
Maria Bamford, Simon & Schuster Audio, 7hr 40min
The US actor and comedian reads her memoir in which she recounts joining scores of support groups in the hope of finding her place in the world.
