Midsummer [Paperback]

A splendid Hudson River estate, complete with cook and rose garden. The landscape is inebriating, the women are in full, passionate bloom, and the men are incomprehensible. Susie-chic, smart, spacey, and no longer promiscuous- decides, at forty-five, to do what she would have done at twenty-five: invite a group of amusing friends to spend eight weekends of summer in stunning surroundings. The invitees include her oldest friend, Kay, elegantly nursing a broken heart; her former lover Dodge-still the sexiest man she knows; his randy, neurotic, comedian friend Ron; and Elise, an on-the-cusp artist determined to be in a relationship before she hits forty. Add to the mix Susie's very ardent, very surprising twenty-four-year-old son, and an exhibitionist au pair next door, and you have a delicious romantic farce that deftly slides into and out of something quite a bit darker.

PRAISE FOR MIDSUMMER
“Marcelle Clements, in her fine, graceful Midsummer, has given us a
book full of a rose garden’s suggestive stillness, heat, and cultivated
beauty.”—O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
“Midsummer is a novel of haunting beauty and almost terrifyingly
acute perceptions. By the time I reached the book’s subtle, devastating
closing lines, I actually gasped at Clement’s command of comedy and
pathos, and her ability to chart their endlessly intermingling.”
—MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, a u t h o r o f THE HOURS

TUTTI

FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND

Thursday

The rose garden needed watering. By midday the ground was parched and the fullest, heaviest blooms seemed to be waiting for the wind to rise and scatter all their petals. Impossibly open, already a little seared on their edges, they yielded the last of their beauty to the sun. To be beautiful a few hours more or less, what does it matter to a rose?

As if they had noted the lack of shadow on the old sundial, the birds and the bulS×