"Best of all in my reading experience this year was Ann Patchett's Tom Lake.It's a beautiful, loving story. And its echoes of Our Town are spot on." - Daily Kos "This rich and subtle tale is infused with insight into love, loss and the power of making the right decisions." - Woman & Home (UK) "Subversively wise and self-aware." - New Yorker "Across her oeuvre Patchett has proven herself a generous, meticulous mentor, and Tom Lake is one of this year's triumphs." - Chapter 16 "Tom Lake is a book to be savored--the once-in-a-blue-moon type." - San Francisco Chronicle "Tom Lake is Ann Patchett's best novel.
" - Hudson Review "Meryl Streep.is ideal for narrating Tom Lake. Streep delivers with her signature whimsy, her cadence lilting from wide-eyed innocence to winking wisdom, blurring the nostalgia for small-town Americana with dashes of big-city dreams." - New York Times Book Review "Tom Lake.[takes] its time to marvel over the quiet drama of ordinary living: a strong marriage, a loving family, a place to gather at the end of the day." - Houston Chronicle "Patchett is a writer of enormous warmth." - Wall Street Journal "A quiet and reassuring book . highly conscious of .
[the] human failure to appreciate the little things." - New York Times "Tom Lake is a beautiful, stirring book that sneaks up on you and makes a deep impression, partly because you're left asking yourself: "What have I just read?" The moment I finished it, I wanted to go back and start again." - Sunday Times (London) "Patchett celebrates not just the smallest events of our lives, but "small" lives themselves." - Financial Times "A new Ann Patchett novel is always cause for celebration. and Tom lake could be one of her best." - inews "A compelling narrative about the secret lives of parents--and how to find happiness in the midst of a long life." - Time "Patchett, beloved bookseller and chronicler of people thrown together in patched families and hostage situations, turns her attention to love -- youthful, marital, fleeting, enduring." - NPR "Tom Lake is about romantic love, marital love and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry.
This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel." - Washington Post "Tom Lake is a warm, funny book about kind people who do the best they can." - Minneapolis Star Tribune "A tender, absorbing tale about becoming who we are." - People "[Patchett] writes with deep attention to our country's changing culture while never taking her eye off narrative. Each book uses a traditional storytelling structure -- lyrics, midrash, folk tales -- while pushing at the edges of what a form can contain, cramming it with modern human concerns, triumphs and tragedies." - Los Angeles Times "Tom Lake is about love in all its many forms. But it is also about death and the ephemeral and how everything goes by so damned fast. It is an elegy of sorts but also a promise that there will be magic no matter what.
" - Los Angeles Review of Books "Patchett is a consummate storyteller whose fluid, naturalistic writing style makes reading her novels an effortless journey.Tom Lake does not disappoint." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution.