Harvard Book Store Presents:

Ann Patchett and Richard Russo

presenting

Tom Lake: A Novel 

and

Somebody’s Fool: A Novel

Please Note: Tickets to this event are sold out.

Harvard Book Store welcomes ANN PATCHETT—renowned author of These Precious Days—and RICHARD RUSSO—Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls—to discuss their latest novels Tom Lake and Somebody’s Fool. 

Ticketing

Please Note: Tickets to this event are sold out. 

About Tom Lake

In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature.” —The Guardian

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

About Somebody’s Fool

“Russo’s latest book has an engaging plot that sensitively and insightfully explores themes of grief and reconciliation . . . the relationships between the characters give this story an emotional depth that has an undeniable appeal.” —Library Journal

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and to the characters that captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of readers in his beloved best sellers Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool.

Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is annexed by its much wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully’s son, is still grappling with his father’s tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.

Meanwhile, the towns’ newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond, after the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice’s ex-lover. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully’s married ex-lover, and her daughter Janey struggle to understand Janey’s daughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter’s other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town’s residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body, and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed.

Infused with all the wry humor and shrewd observations that Russo is known for, Somebody’s Fool is another classic from a modern master.

Update on Event Masking Policies

Masks are not required for this event. As of June 1, 2023, masks are encouraged but not required for most Harvard Book Store events, unless otherwise specified. Please review individual listings.

Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is the author of nine novels: The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, Commonwealth, The Dutch House and Tom Lake. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written four books of nonfiction–Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, What Now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment, and These Precious Days, essays on home, family, friendship, and writing. In 2019, she published her first children’s book, Lambslide, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser, followed by Escape Goat in 2020.

Photo Credit: Heidi Ross

Richard Russo

Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are . . ., Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, was adapted into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.

Photo Credit: Elena Seibert