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

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

We should have one night that is not about the future or the past, one night to celebrate these two people and nothing else but we’ve blown it. “You don’t want children?” I ask her.

The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.

She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

feet cold. The expression came from a literal condition: every time I spoke her first line, which was nothing more than the single word No! all the blood in my body surged to my heart in an act of self-preservation. My heart needed the blood in order to survive, and so my bloodless extremities were left to freeze.

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.

behind you.” I take the two-track away from the orchard and towards the woods until I find the smallest break in the trees, a path I know to look for only because I’ve come this way a thousand times. It’s like stepping into a book, one turn and everything changes: cool instead of hot, dark instead of light. Instead of cherry trees, eighty-foot heml

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.

I smiled because I wanted Cat to think I understood the ways of the world. One person’s endured lechery was another person’s cherished summer affair.

Or maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.