A classic, now available in paperback again: 75.000 copies sold in Germany
"A delicate, elegiac, regretful novel, by a former editor of this Book Review, in which boy meets girl and dad steals girl on an island off New England in the last enchanted summer of 1963." -- New York Times
A small masterpiece.’ - Barbara von Becker, Frankfurter Rundschau
‘[His style] is succinct but not cold, pared-down but not dry, calm but not placid… Thewonderful thing about this book is that itis actually better than Turgenev’s.’ - Harald Jähner, Berliner Zeitung
Here we find the images we strive for in life.’- Martin Lüdke, Die Zeit
‘In the summer of 1963 I fell in love, and my father drowned.’ So begins this story of a summer that changes everything.
Fifteen-year-old Michael is spending the holidays with his parents on the Atlantic coast, as he does every year. But this year something is different: the seductive Mrs Mertz and her twenty-year-old daughter Zina have moved into the guesthouse next door.
Michael is not the only one to be captivated by the otherness and openness of the two women. He promptly falls in love with the beautiful Zina and finds himself hopelessly at the mercy of her caprices. But when he sees his romantic feelings betrayed in the cruellest way, the innocent world of his childhood is destroyed, and the summer takes a tragic turn.
In this retelling of Turgenev’s novel ‘First Love’, Simmons paints a sensitive and almost wistful picture of the loss of childhood innocence that comes with the turmoil of first love. It is set against a backdrop of a summer by the sea, full of colour and atmosphere