In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic sends the world into lockdown, Lara's three grown daughters return to the family's cherry orchard in Northern Michigan. Picking fruit together, they press their mother to finally tell the full story of Peter Duke — the actor, now world-famous, with whom she shared a stage and a passionate summer romance long before any of them were born.
The narrative moves between the present-day orchard and the summer Lara spent at Tom Lake, a Michigan theater company, playing Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Her whirlwind love affair with the young, unknown Duke burned bright and ended abruptly, and the distance between that dazzling summer and the quiet, contented life she later built with her husband Joe becomes the novel's real subject.
Threaded through with Our Town and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Tom Lake is a tender meditation on young love, married love, and the hidden lives parents lead before their children arrive. Ann Patchett writes with warmth and restraint about memory, choice, and the difficult art of being happy — of recognizing a good life while you are living it, even as the world outside falls apart.