Sumr

Sumr explores the interconnectedness of memory, creativity, place, responsibility, and relationship-to our blood kin, to our chosen family, and, especially, to the accidental and profound connections life brings to us. Condar is a man on a mission obsessed with films he's seen of the effects of atomic blasts on pigs made by the US government in the 1950s. Miranda is a young woman with an unreliable memory and intuitive wisdom who inherits a three-year-old from an in-law. She encounters Slade, a man searching for his own center, for a framework on which to hang his life, while Slade's artist brother, Ruben, is confined to a rigid framework-prison-for a crime he didn't commit. Camille, the child that Miranda is bequeathed, struggles with a grief she can't name-the loss of her mother-and, in the process, is healed by the love of her happenstance family and heals Miranda and the two men in her life.

The novel is about inferences, incomplete messages, missing pieces, and the truths we find within them. Much of the text in the book is in truncated English-which, like our efforts to perceive and understand one another-is incomplete but still allows us to create a net of story and belonging that holds us together.