Summer of Love
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"A love letter to California…. Through the deftly rendered lives of sisters, mothers and daughters, and longtime friends, Maher reveals how telling the truth can guide us back to ourselves and carry us forward with hope.”—Marjan Kamali, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion Women of Tehran
In this moving novel about the transformative power of storytelling, three women make life-changing decisions set in motion by the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, from the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller.
It’s the summer of 1967 and the counterculture revolution is in full swing in San Francisco. Every street is alive with the music of Jim Morrison and Dionne Warwick, and in view of the Golden Gate bridge young people come together, waving anti-war signs and shouting for equal rights. No one is more into the messages of love and peace than Winnie Hartley who has just graduated from UC Berkeley determined to use poetry to capture the ever-shifting world around her. When she reconnects with her high school boyfriend, an aspiring musician, their creative bond further fuels her work, and it feels like her life is finally taking off.
Meanwhile, miles up the winding coast, her sister Miranda stays close to home, throwing herself into running the family business, Hartley Vineyard. She’s determined to make California wine that rivals French. But change is in the air this wild and heady summer, and each sister will make choices that set their lives hurdling down paths neither would have imagined.
Fifty years later, Dawn Hartley stays as far as possible from her family’s famous vineyard, until a work assignment requires her to research the bestselling Vineland novels penned by a famously anonymous author. Determined to discover the identity of this mysterious writer—who seems to know things no one should about her family—Dawn embarks on a soul-searching journey along the windswept coast of California to uncover her family’s secrets even as she’s keeping a big one of her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enjoyable family drama from Maher (All You Have to Do Is Call), a Napa winery harbors family secrets dating back to 1967. During the Summer of Love, sisters Winnie and Miranda Hartley attend a Doors concert at a mountainside amphitheater in Marin, where Winnie runs into her high school boyfriend Lincoln Salyer and begins an unhealthy relationship with him. Miranda returns to the family winery in Napa, where she immerses herself in the business and goes on to raise her only child, Dawn. In 2015, Dawn struggles with heavy drinking and blackouts and is afraid to tell Miranda about her problem. She finds strength from her sober friend Audrey and from the Vineyard series of children's books, which include suspiciously familiar details about the Hartleys' winery. Inspired, Dawn goes on a road trip with Audrey, hoping to track down the books' reclusive author. Maher skillfully handles the delicate subjects of addiction and recovery and offers transportive descriptions of 1960s San Francisco and California wine country. It's a sympathetic portrait of a woman's search for fulfillment.
