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.

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 ROMAN STORIES

The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth - Rome--metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical--is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories

In "The Boundary," one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker's daughter, who nurses a wound from her family's immigrant past. In "P's Parties," a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend's yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line.

And in "The Steps," on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy's capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri's adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.

ABOUT THE CANDLE

At Parson Brown, we believe in the power of rituals and the role they play in helping us form deeper connections, both with ourselves and the world around us. Whether you are in pursuit of inner calm or setting a mood for a dinner party, light our candle and enjoy its bright yet soothing scent. Available in two sizes.

Notes
Top notes: Bergamot, Neroli
Body notes: Teak, Tobacco, Hemp
Bottom notes: Pine, Sandalwood, Peppercorn

Details

• Vegan Formula

• Made in USA

• Reusable Glass Jar

• Premium Soy & Coconut Wax Blend

• Approx. 25 hour burn time (4 oz)

• Hand-poured in Massachusetts

• Crafted by women artisans and refugees

• Trim wick after each use.