Summerlong

In the sweltering heat of one summer in Grinnell, Iowa, Claire and Don Lowry discover that married life can fall apart seemingly overnight. Don, the town's most successful real-estate agent, is hiding the fact that their home is in foreclosure from his wife, Claire. She has secrets of her own: she's bored, lonely and lusts after Charlie Gulliver, a failed actor who has returned home to sort out his father's affairs.

As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, the town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused. Claire, Don, and their neighbours and friends find themselves on an existential odyssey, exploring the most puzzling quandaries of marriage and maturity. When does a fantasy become infidelity? When does happy routine become boring monotony? Can Claire and Don survive everything that befalls them in this one summer, forgive their mistakes, and begin again?

SUMMERLONG is a deft and hilarious exploration of the simmering tensions beneath the surface of a contented marriage that explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small town over the course of a long, hot summer.

“Summerlong is the Great White Midlife Crisis novel that Jonathan Franzen has tried to write (and failed) and Jonathan Lethem has tried to write (and failed) and Michael Chabon (wisely) half-avoided ever trying to write. But Dean Bakopoulos pulls it off”

Dean Bakopoulos is a great talent-everything he writes is full of insight and inspiration and the best kind of divine comedy. - Lorrie Moore

There is no better guide through a hot summer in the heartland than Dean Bakopoulos. It turns out there also may be no better place than Iowa for passion and insanity and mournfulness and a leveling sanity, too, to disturb the peace. Lovers chasing all over the joint, the glorious wreckage, and Bakopoulos with his keen eye, his sympathy and his wit, there to see all. - Jane Hamilton, bestselling author of A Map of the World

Dean Bakopoulos has written the funniest, saddest, sultriest, most profound account of love gone wrong and right you'll encounter this year. Summerlong is the novel everyone will be reading all summer long, the beach read you've been waiting for-one that sweeps you away with its story while impressing you with its insightful intelligence and stylistic elegance. - Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon and The Wilding

Summerlong is Dean Bakopoulos at his finest: daringly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and forever on the watch for redemption. This is a book for any season, any reader, anywhere-it shimmers with magic, lust, and love. - Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs

Tennessee Williams has nothing on Bakopoulos when it comes to marital and moral dissipation fuelled by the summer's rising temperatures. Yet into this emotional abyss Bakopoulos injects a high degree of coy humour and wry self-deprecation to deliver a heartbreaking and wise novel of false starts and new beginnings. A sure hit with fans of the three Jonathans: Dee, Franzen, and Tropper. - Starred Booklist review

This is that rare, contemporary suburban novel with characters the reader can actually embrace in spite of their many flaws. - Publishers Weekly

Provocative, sultry... the novel stays light on its feet; its breezy chapters are laced with sex and humor... between the louche vibe and matriarchal presence, the novel often feels like Armistead Maupin's San Francisco teleported to the Midwest - Kirkus

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Please Don't Come Back From the Moon (Transworld, 2006) and My American Unhappiness (HMH, 2011). He is the writer-in-residence of English at Grinnell College, and lives in Iowa.

In the sweltering heat of one summer in Grinnell, Iowa, Claire and Don Lowry discover that married life can fall apart seemingly overnight. Don, the town's most successful real-estate agent, is hiding the fact that their home is in foreclosure from his wife, Claire. She has secrets of her own: she's bored, lonely and lusts after Charlie Gulliver, a failed actor who has returned home to sort out his father's affairs. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, the town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused. Claire, Don, and their neighbours and friends find themselves on an existential odyssey, exploring the most puzzling quandaries of marriage and maturity. When does a fantasy become infidelity? When does happy routine become boring monotony? Can Claire and Don survive everything that befalls them in this one summer, forgive their mistakes, and begin again? SUMMERLONG is a deft and hilarious exploration of the simmering tensions beneath the surface of a contented marriage that explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small town over the course of a long, hot summer.

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