The Library Book Club | July | Tom Lake

Held in person at The Library in St. Pete on the third Tuesday of every month. This book club focuses on popular, yet compelling book club novels that spark connection and conversation.

Books are available in-person or online at the Oxford Exchange Bookstore.

Tom Lake | Ann Patchett

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

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.

Upcoming Book Clubs

• August The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• September Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
• October The Women by Kristin Hannah
• November Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah
• December TBD