A DISTANT SUMMER
DEBORAH MARTIN
The discovery of letters from a pen pal 50 years ago pushes Elizabeth to review the past. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous year of social unrest and politics in 1968, she was a teenager at risk of being in love with someone she had never met. Her family was in danger from the encroachment of the Vietnam war and its own internal battles.
It’s a quiet farming area of Indiana where nothing seems to happen, but an accident causes a rift through the family and Elizabeth’s uncle is expunged from its history by the strict Methodist patriarch, Grandpa Ernest.
Now settled in suburban Virginia with her husband and about to become a grandmother, Elizabeth is helping to clear out the family home after her father’s death. Looking back, Elizabeth feels a restlessness to know whether a life with the boy in the letters would have been a better path than the one she took. She yearns to discover what happened to him and to locate another childhood friend. In her quest to find them, she catches glimpses of an alternative narrative to that distant summer.
DEBORAH MARTIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deborah Martin has drawn the setting for her debut novel, A Distant Summer, from her origins in MidWest America. Her recollections of life in a farming community feed into the characters of the story.
She's an example of how life can take unexpected directions as she surprised herself in living most of her adult life in the UK after moving there to marry an Englishman.
Wanting to write a novel since her teens, she has taken a wandering path through a variety of jobs and hobbies before accomplishing that goal, but now hopes the next book will not take as long.
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