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Bloomsbury Publishing has signed Tom Lake, the “luminous” new novel from Ann Patchett, with Meryl Streep attached to voice the audiobook.
Publisher for Bloomsbury Trade Alexis Kirschbaum acquired UK and Commonwealth rights including audio from Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown on behalf of Dan Kirschen at CAA. It will be published simultaneously by Bloomsbury and HarperCollins in the US on 8th August. In the UK it will be supported by a "superlead" marketing and publicity campaign.
The synopsis reads: “During the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they persuade Lara to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom Lara once shared both a stage and a whirlwind romance in the 1980s.
“It’s the story they’ve never heard, at least not in full: the story of the summer and love that changed the course of their mother’s life. And as Lara takes them back to a summer spent by Tom Lake, her daughters—now grown, with their own lives and loves—begin to see their mother more completely than ever before.”
Described by the publisher as “a luminous novel from a master storyteller”, Tom Lake is about the lives parents lead before their children are born, the choices we make that inform who we become, and what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
Patchett is the author of several novels, works of non-fiction and children’s books. Novels include Bel Canto (Fourth Estate), which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2002, and Commonwealth (Bloomsbury Publishing). Her most recent novel, The Dutch House (Bloomsbury Publishing), was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Patchett is also the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and is the owner of Parnassus Books.
Kirschbaum said: “Ann Patchett is the most sublime, pleasurable, humane writer. Her novels epitomise the sophisticated art of storytelling that is so important to all of us at Bloomsbury Trade. Tom Lake is a timeless novel that reminds us of what the best of fiction can do: fill us up, break our hearts and make us nostalgic for lives we haven’t lived.”
Blunt added: “Tom Lake is a stunning exploration of love, as unsentimental as it is generous. A mother is placed centrestage and a past life is unpacked. This is a book which delights in both the power of memory and invention. Prepare to be transported.”