The Summer of '39 A Novel

Nancy Brewster, a wizened recluse living on the coast of New England, reflects on the baleful events that have cruelly shaped her life. She is writing her memoirs, largely to exorcise the insanity that kept her incarcerated for years. From her life in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village in the 1920s to her marriage to a luckless literary dreamer to an ill-fated visit from strangers in the summer of 1939, Nancy keeps returning to her encounter with Isabel March, an enigmatic poet and practiced husband-stealer. Their friendship, while beginning auspiciously, ends in a tangle of divorce and madness. Nancy's circling, seemingly artless memories soon carry us to a climax as startling and monstrous as any in contemporary fiction. Inspired by the events that occurred when the poets Robert Graves and Laura Riding left Europe to spend a summer with a young American couple, The Summer of '39 is both a profound account of one woman's madness and a haunting paean to the world on the eve of the Second World War.