THIS SUMMER, DIVE INTO TOM LAKE - THE BREATH-TAKING NEW NOVEL FROM ANN PATCHETT THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * THE NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK ''A new Ann Patchett novel is always cause for celebration ... and Tom Lake is one of her best'' i ''This comforting summer read has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships'' REESE WITHERSPOON ''Filled with the moments I live for in a story'' BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry ''One of the most beloved authors of her generation'' SUNDAY TIMES ----------------------------- This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor.
This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn''t famous at all.
It''s about falling so wildly in love with him - the way one will at twenty-four - that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight.
There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.
It''s spring and Lara''s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they''ve always longed to hear - of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
''One of our greatest living chroniclers of love and marriage . Expect wonder; Patchett always delivers'' ELLE ----------------------------- Praise for The Dutch House:
''Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature'' Guardian ''The best book I''ve read in years'' Rosamund Lupton ''Her finest novel yet'' Sunday Times ''The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something'' John Boyne ''A masterpiece'' Cathy Rentzenbrink ''Bliss'' Nigella Lawson The Dutch House was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller w/e 28.09.19
Next, dive into TOM LAKE - the breath-taking newest novel from Ann Patchett
Lose yourself in the story of a lifetime - the unforgettable Sunday Times bestseller
'Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature' Guardian
Nominated for the Women's Prize 2020
A STORY OF TWO SIBLINGS, THEIR CHILDHOOD HOME, AND A PAST THAT THEY CAN'T LET GO.
Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.
In the economic boom following the Second World War, Cyril Conroy's real estate investments take his family from poverty to enormous wealth. With it he buys the Dutch House, a lavish mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
Danny Conroy grows up in the opulence of the Dutch House. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. The siblings grow and change as life plays out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners, in the frames of their oil paintings.
Then one day their father brings home Andrea, a new stepmother. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives: exiled from the house and tossed back into the poverty from which their family rose, Danny and Maeve have only each other to count on.
'The best book I've read in years' Rosamund Lupton
'Her finest novel yet' Sunday Times
'The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something' John Boyne
'A masterpiece' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'Bliss' Nigella Lawson
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2012 There were people on the banks of the river.
Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate.
A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns.
Now Marina Singh, Anders' colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders's wife, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend's steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest.
What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and susurrating grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination.
Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough.
Dazzling . The combination of lightness, warmth and remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story.
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER An unforgettably powerful new novel of the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go - from the Number One New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto 'The book of the autumn. The American author of Commonwealth (brilliant) and Bel Canto (even better) releases perhaps her finest novel yet' - Sunday Times 'The buzz around The Dutch House is totally justified. Her best yet, which is saying something' - John Boyne "'Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?' I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer." Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings.
Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. The siblings are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother's: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.
Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale and story of a paradise lost; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives.
