Determined to record every summer day, young history teacher Luke Devlin starts school vacation imagining he’ll describe backcountry adventures in the Rockies and sun-splashed days home in Denver. But all too soon the season veers into crisis, when his older brother faces life-threatening illness and Luke becomes entangled in a love affair that’s as fast-moving and possibly as fatal as his brother’s diagnosis. As Luke manages the household for his absent parents and struggles with the constant pressure of his unfinished master’s deadline, his fling with a Wyoming rancher grows serious just as his brother’s crisis overwhelms him. Luke’s love of his native ground and his search for romance collide with the hard realities of mortality and loss during an unexpected summer.

A SWEET ROMANCE FROM L A TAVARES Time heals some wounds. The first time Lyla Savoie Kenney found love—boundless, passionate love—it wasn't with a person but a place. She found deep-rooted endearment there, and in keeping with tradition, it caused her first real heartbreak too. Lyla grew up on the beaches at Begoa's Point, a campground she and her father visited each summer for seventeen years. She spent each non-summer month counting down the days until she could return, until going back was no longer an option. Begoa's Point closed with no explanation. Fifteen years later, now a widowed mother with a child of her own, Begoa's Point is reopening its doors. Lyla is surprised when she is abruptly moved off the waiting list and given a reservation at the camp, but even more surprising is what she finds when she arrives. Weston Accardi, the first boy Lyla ever gave her heart to, is the proud new owner of the Begoa's property. He has changed—and not just because a prosthetic leg now exists where a natural limb once did. He is no longer the carefree rebel he used to be but has grown into a responsible businessman. Their past, however, refuses to remain such, cycling back to smother the fire they've tried so hard to rebuild since her arrival to the reopened campground.

A middle-aged woman who returns to the apartment in Barcelona where she grew up comes to terms with her past and her sexuality in a relationship with another woman

Since childhood, Tony Fabijančić has travelled frequently to Yugoslavia and Croatia, the homeland of his father. He spent time with his peasant family in the village of Srebrnjak in the north and escaped to the Adriatic islands in the south where he could break free from the constraints of everyday life. Those two worlds—the north, marked by the haunting saga of family life, its history and material practices, and the south, a place defined by travel and escape—formed the two halves of Fabijančić’s Croatian life. Over time, he observed Srebrnjak become a white-collar weekend retreat, the community of peasants of the 1970s, to which he was first introduced, only a distant memory. From the continental interior of green valleys and plum orchards to the austere and skeletal karst coast, Drink in the Summer is a unique record of a place and people now lost to time, a description of a country’s varied landscapes, and a journey of discovery, freedom, beauty, and love.