Farewell, Summer

Helen Hooven Santmyer

“It’s hard to think of a better place to spend the summer than in [Helen Hooven Santmyer’s] world.” —Cosmopolitan

“Charming . . . gracefully done.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

It’s a long, languorous, country summer in a small Ohio town. After many years spent away as a scholar and writer, Elizabeth Lane has returned to the setting of her most poignant childhood memories, a town steeped in her family’s long history. She comes to Sunbury to work on a book but finds she is haunted by one memory in particular. It was 1905, she was eleven and in love with her cousin, Steve, painfully watching his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Damaris. Looking back, Elizabeth discovers a world of feelings that she knows belong more to adulthood than childhood and, as she sees the tragic, doomed love of Steve and Damaris, she wishes she could be a child forever.

Peopled with superbly realized characters, steeped in the golden glow of an era fondly recalled, and marked by the prodigious talent displayed in “. . . And Ladies of the Club,” Farewell, Summer is the moving tale of star-crossed love—innocent and elusive—and of a young girl’s coming of age.

Helen Hooven Santmyer was born in Cincinnati in 1895 and raised in Xenia, Ohio. She is the author of the widely acclaimed “. . . And Ladies of the Club” as well as Ohio Town and The Fierce Dispute. She died in 1986.