How much change can one summer bring? If you're Caddie Winger - 32 years old, still living with her grandmother and giving piano lessons to neighborhood children - one summer can make the whole world look different. Caddie's mother died when she was nine, and her grandmother raised her. Now their roles are reversed, and it's Caddie who takes care of Nana. When her grandmother breaks her leg and insists on going into a convalescent home, Caddie finds herself being pulled out of her comfy, self-made nest. Living alone for the first time since college, she uncovers some startling truths from her past. Jolted, she looks at the world with new eyes and begins to take charge of her future. As she makes a new best friend, takes risks she never dreamed she could, and navigates the depths and shallows of true love and devastating heartbreak, Caddie learns how to trust other people, and, ultimately, how to trust herself. Wise, moving and reassuringly real, THE GOODBYE SUMMER offers us a deeper understanding of the perplexing and invigorating magic that is life itself.
Patricia Gaffney began her writing career with the publication of Sweet Treason, a historical romance set in revolutionary Scotland. Eleven romance novels later, she tried something different--The Saving Graces, a story of women's friendships, that ended up spending 17 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers List.
Circle of Three, Flight Lessons, and The Goodbye Summer followed, all bestsellers that established Gaffney as a premier mainstream fiction writer.
Her new book is Mad Dash, the story of a happy marriage in trouble. It's due out in Spring 2008.
Gaffney, who lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, is currently at work on a novel about a man who changes his life when he finds out he's dying--then finds out he isn't. Working title: On Second Thought.
