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Ballantine
June 2007
On Sale: May 22, 2007
272 pages
ISBN: 0345485866
EAN: 9780345485861
Hardcover
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Fiction
Can reading change your life? Following her acclaimed novel The Doctor’s Daughter,
award-winning author Hilma Wolitzer has now written a
stirring tale about friendship, romance, inspiration,
longing, and, especially, the love of good books. Summer
Reading offers a seductive glimpse into the intersecting
lives of three very different women. Summer in the Hamptons means crowded beaches during the day
and lavish parties in the evening, but Angela Graves, a
retired English professor, prefers the company of Gabriel
García Márquez and Charlotte Brontë. Her only steady social
contacts are with the women in the reading groups she leads,
among them, is wealthy Lissy Snyder, a beautiful newlywed
who hosts the twice-monthly meetings of the Page Turners and
takes pains to hide a reading disability and her emotional
neediness. Hamptons local Michelle Cutty, Lissy’s
housecleaner, eavesdrops on the group’s discussions–of books
and gossip–when she’s not snooping through Lissy’s closets. All three women secretly struggle with troubling personal
issues that threaten the tenuous balance of their lives:
Lissy, abandoned by her father in childhood, is now the
unwilling stepmother of her husband’s hostile children;
Michelle, resentful of the moneyed arrogance of the
jet-setting, seasonal “invaders,” can’t secure a commitment
from her fisherman boyfriend; and solitary, bookish Angela
still bears the shameful memory of a disastrous love affair
that took place long ago. As Angela encourages the Page Turners to identify with the
literary heroines of Trollope and Flaubert, the books–in
fact, the act of reading itself–will influence the tough
choices the women must make. Stunningly evocative and richly
imagined, Summer Reading explores the meaning and
consequences of living an authentic life.
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