Tom Lake: The Sunday Times bestseller - a BBC Radio 2 and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick

and we decide that whitefish is today’s answer to the eternal question of dinner.

And then what? It would have been a different life, one that I will never be able to imagine.

Joe, who never lied, could lie fluently when it was necessary.

“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

Duke had been right, the place had a peace that made a person want to stay. I had never thought about a cemetery that way before, and it helped me.

How could he have stood all that tennis? It was hot and I wanted to swim too, but like Pallace, it never occurred to me that we could have just gone without them. If our boyfriends played tennis then we would sit at the edge of the court and watch them

She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting.

The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female.