Tom Lake: The 2023 BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Dutch House

Very nice book!It's a soft, quiet book and the plot unravels slowly as you read it. I loved Lara as a narrator. She is so calm, honest and self aware while talking about that fateful summer at Tom Lake.

Lara's three grown up daughters have returned to the family farm to help with the cherry harvest during the pandemic lockdown. Over the years, they've heard bits and pieces of their mother's brief, but quite successful career as an actress, and now they persuade her to share more about her relationship with now famous Hollywood actor Peter Duke.Switching between the 1980s and the present, this tale tenderly tells of Lara's youth in New Hampshire, leaving her university to travel to LA after being spotted by a talent scout in a college play. At summer stock theatre, she meets Duke and they immediately embark on a relationship - it is as if Lara has no choice, swept away as she is by her charismatic co-star. Events come to a head when Lara injures her Achilles tendon, the mess of intertwined relationships with Duke's brother Sebastian and another actress Pallace, captured beautifully.What also slowly emerges is how Lara ended up marrying husband Joe and on a farm in Michigan as a result of that summer stock, sweetly connecting the threads. Some parts of the story, Lara leaves unspoken - those are her memories only and not for sharing, no matter how close the family dynamics are.Clearly, the author has used her love of the play Our Town to weave this wonderful story of where we think we are going, and where life takes us.

Beautiful and captivating and comforting writing that keeps you engrossed - careful precise yet elegiac writing - oh to be on that farm!

It has elements of theatre ,cinema, the dark side of it ,the fun side of it , and I love both cinema and theatre .

Too much discriptive. Difficult to follow. Not an easy read.

This is a fake copy that I paid full price for where the last few pages are missing in the book. Shameful!