Tom Lake by Ann Patchett audiobook review

A mother reveals her mysterious past in a tale of choice and the roads not taken

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.