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

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.

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

Publicity was the most acting I’d ever done in my life, and it did nothing to dissuade me from the idea that I was finished.

“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.

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

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.

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

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