Synopses & Reviews
Beloved author Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn) returns with this long-anticipated new novel, a beautifully bittersweet tale of passion, enchantment, and the nature of fate.
It was a typically miserable Puget Sound winter before the arrival of Lioness Lazos. An enigmatic young waitress with strange abilities, when the lovely Lioness comes to Gardner Island even the weather takes notice.
As an impossibly beautiful spring leads into a perfect summer, Lioness is drawn to a complicated family. She is taken in by two disenchanted lovers—dynamic Joanna Delvecchio and scholarly Abe Aronson—visited by Joanna’s previously unlucky-in-love daughter, Lily. With Lioness in their lives, they are suddenly compelled to explore their deepest dreams and desires.
Lioness grows more captivating as the days grow longer. Her new family thrives, even as they may be growing apart. But lingering in Lioness’s past is a dark secret—and even summer days must pass.
Review
"Peter Beagle’s novel Summerlong is a lovely, tantalizing read that moves through a finely-detailed, familiar world into a tale as old and as urgent as language. Its strong-minded characters grab threads of the tale and try to pull it into wildly different directions, tangling passion, comedy, love, despair into a study of life on the B-flat harmonica, accompanied by a soundtrack of wind and waves, and, always, good smells from the kitchen." Patricia A. McKillip, author of Dreams of Distant Shores and Kingfisher
Review
"In his first new novel in more than a decade, Beagle creates an intimate drama....A beautifully detailed fantasy." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Retired history professor Abe Aronson and his longtime lover, Joanna Delvecchio, encounter an enigmatic young beauty, Lioness Lazos, waitressing in a local diner. Abe offers her his old garage as a temporary home. From the moment she becomes part of their lives, changes—some miraculous, some devastating—begin affecting Abe and Joanna. Lioness’s presence inspires Abe to fulfill his cherished dream of playing second harmonica with a small jazz band and Joanna to learn the dicey sport of kayaking, even though she can’t swim. As their heady summer phases into early autumn, Lioness’s mysterious husband appears on the ferry from Seattle, bringing with him the chilly and inevitable resolution to Beagle’s strange and lovely lyric vision." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"Bestseller fantasist Beagle crafts a tantalizing picture of an atypical Pacific Northwestern couple whose lives are interrupted by myth and mystery. When a mysterious young woman, Lioness, appears as Joanna’s and Abe’s waitress in the Skyliner diner, they are immediately drawn to her Primavera aura and offer her a home in Abe’s garage. Life on Gardner Island blooms in an endless summer during Lioness’s stay. Joanna’s and Abe’s lives, as a middle-aged flight attendant and an aging history professor, and their relationship continue as usual until Lioness’s attempt to run from her past starts to fail when her mother and husband arrive in town. This arrival reveals to Abe, Joanna, and Joanna’s daughter Lily that they are witnessing the ancient Greek myth of Persephone unfold. Themes of love, loss, nurturing and adapting are wrapped up in this deliberate and bittersweet tale of what it is to love in your own time, in your own way." Booklist
About the Author
Peter S. Beagle is the best-selling author of The Last Unicorn, which has sold a reported five million copies since its initial publication in 1968. His other novels include A Fine & Private Place, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. His short fiction has been collected in four volumes by Tachyon Publications, including The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, The Line Between, We Never Talk About My Brother, and Sleight of Hand. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire awards and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Peter S. Beagle on PowellsBooks.Blog
I never know how long a book or a story is going to take me to write. My first novel,
A Fine and Private Place, took me a year, starting in the summer when I was a music counselor at a children’s camp and ending the following September, when I left for the requisite young-writer-wandering-Europe year...
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