Summer
A moving, rich, compelling novel about an extraordinary family, a family of charm, talent, and cultivation, during the summer when the glamorous mother they adore and admire is dying—about how each of them, privately and with the others, strives to let go and accept the limits of love.
Knopf, 1985
Summer
Knopf, 1985
A moving, rich, compelling novel about an extraordinary family, a family of charm, talent, and cultivation, during the summer when the glamorous mother they adore and admire is dying—about how each of them, privately and with the others, strives to let go and accept the limits of love.
Reviews of Summer
Compelling... The youthful zest shines through with charm... Summer introduces a group of attractive characters, and contains a love story that is both fragile and robust... [It] is peopled with characters who are intriguing and keep one interested right to the final sentence. — The Los Angeles Times
“Admirably well-crafted... Summer takes on real power when that narrator finally cracks into fury and grief, in taut scenes in which she, the daughter, must become the parent to her dying mother.”
A lean, piercing novel... Lisa Grunwald has found an intonation and an idiom entirely her own, and if her novel brims with pain, it also fulfills Francis Bacon's famous and difficult demand that ideally the “heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.” — Time
Summer is the story of a family falling apart, then gathering their resources and finding inner strength to cope with the deepest of loss. It is about the inner strength everyone has, the strength that comes from love. — Kansas City Star
A struggle with the power to engage us. Summer draws an opposition between two kinds of art: art that celebrates life's power to change, and art that is man's attempt to control what he cannot. — The New York Times Book Review
Poignant and utterly believable. — San Francisco Chronicle
“A heartening book about life’s most disheartening calamities.”
A heartening book about life's most disheartening calamities. — The Philadelphia Inquirer
An affective portrait of loss. — Vanity Fair
A highly romantic novel... carries a solid emotional wallop. — People
What finally emerges and triumphs is the irresistible tug of life—the intricacies of love, the uplifting power of art, the challenge of growing and learning... A story of death becomes a story of life... — Booklist