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

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

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

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.

Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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