It's a long, languorous, country summer in a small Ohio town. After many years spent away as a scholar and writer, Elizabeth Lane has returned to the setting of her most poignant childhood memories, a town steeped in her family's long history. She comes to Sunbury to work on a book but finds she is haunted by one memory in particular. It was 1905, she was eleven and in love with her cousin, Steve, painfully watching his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Damaris. Looking back, Elizabeth discovers a world of feelings that she knows belong more to adulthood than to childhood, and as she sees the tragic, doomed love of Steve and Damaris, she wishes she could be a child forever.

Peopled with superbly realized characters, steeped in the golden glow of an era fondly recalled, and marked by the prodigious talent displayed in ". . . And Ladies of the Club", Farewell, Summer is the moving tale of star-crossed love -- innocent and elusive -- and of a young girl's coming of age.