Summerlong

Don Lowry, a married father of three, wakes up one morning to find himself stoned and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he's barely met. Meanwhile, his wife Claire leaves the house that same night intending to go on a midnight run and ends up bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. In the sweltering heat of one summer in their small Midwestern town, Claire and Don discover that married life isn't turning out quite as they'd predicted.As the temperature rises, the town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while the children grow more and more confused. Claire, Don, and their neighbors and friends find themselves delving into the essential quandaries of marriage and maturity—when does a fantasy turn into infidelity? When does compromise turn into resentment? When does routine become intolerable monotony? Can Claire and Don survive everything that befalls them in this one summer, let go of their mistakes, and begin again?Award-winning writer Dean Bakopoulos delivers a brutally honest yet incredibly funny novel about the strange and tenuous ties that bind us. Summerlong is a novel of connections, and all the strange and unlikely places you find them. Full of mirth, grief, and redemption, Summerlong explores what happens when life doesn't go exactly the way you've planned.