Summer Gone

Canadian best-selling author David Macfarlane has written a masterful first novel about love experienced and love remembered that flickers with fleeting passions and sudden tragedies, offering an elegy not only for the ephemeral beauty of northern summers but for an entire era.

Summer Gone is about that moment when everything stops. Like skilled canoeists, we briefly hold a perfect balance -- poised between innocence and experience, life and death, discovery and loss, the promise of spring and the melancholy of autumn.

Set among the islands and lakes of "cottage country," this beautifully crafted novel from one of Canada's premier writers explores the stories of three generations of lost summers: the girl in the blue bathing suit; the impenetrable and doomed camp counselor with the shifting features; the wife who comes alive to the rhythms of a cottage summer, wild blueberries, and lake gossip, though who remains blind to the secret that will change her life irrevocably. But the beating heart of this novel lies in the story of a divorced father and a young son separated by the silence of estrangement, and how during one extraordinary night on an ill-fated canoe trip the silence is broken. As the story unfolds and the mystery unravels, tragedy looms over father and son in ways they could never have imagined, and leads to the novel's gripping and startling conclusion.
Graced by a spare beauty of language and a deeply humane intelligence and wit, Summer Gone is an exquisite novel.