Invincible Summer

Alice Adams

01 June 2017
9781509814725
352 pages

Synopsis

Inseparable through university, Eva, Benedict, Sylvie and Lucien graduate into an exhilarating world on the brink of the new millennium. Eager to shrug off the hardships of her childhood, Eva breaks away to work in the City. Benedict stays behind to complete his PhD in Physics and pine for Eva, while siblings Sylvie and Lucien seek a more bohemian life of art, travel and adventure.

As their twenties give way to their thirties, the four friends find their paths diverging as they struggle to navigate broken hearts and thwarted dreams. With every summer that passes, they try to remain as close as they once were - but this is far from easy. One friend's triumph coincides with another's disaster, one finds love as another loses it, one comes to their senses as another is changing their mind . . . And who knows where any of us will be in twenty summers' time?

A warm, wise and witty novel about finding the courage to carry on despite life not always turning out as expected, and a powerful testament to love and friendship as the constants in an ever-changing world, Invincible Summer by Alice Adams is a dazzling depiction of the highs and lows of adulthood and the greater forces that shape us.

Irresistible . . . A crackerjack storyteller who deeply inhabits her characters - deploying pitch-perfect dialogue to poignant and hilarious effect - Adams uses the conventions of the form to examine larger ideas about class and commerce, art and science, friendship and family at the time of the most recent fin de siecle . . . charming.
Moving . . . bittersweet and compassionate . . . Like your favourite Austen novel, Invincible Summer reconciles the cultural reality of an era with the personal lives of its characters.
Irresistible.