The Summer Before the Summer of Love - Softcover

"The liltingly funny title of Swick’s second stellar short story collection is indicative of her wistfulness and tender irony. Swick is keenly attuned to the persistence of sorrow and the snarl of emotions underlying everyday lives."—Publishers Weekly.

The ten stories in this collection explore the intimate dynamics of parents and children, friends and lovers, and husbands and wives. The characters stand on unstable ground and coexist with unpleasant truths: a grown son drives his mother to the abortion clinic; two girls go on a road trip to a Beatles concert with their divorced mother; three recently single women try to purge the past with a garage sale; a father moves into his daughter’s group house in Berkeley. Grappling with loss and disappointment, struggling to become whole again or for the first time, her characters pass like ghosts through their own lives, seeking to understand, imperfectly and belatedly, where they’ve come from and what might have been.