THE SUMMER BOY, Philippe Besson's récit of coming of age during tragedy's aftermath

THE SUMMER BOY
PHILIPPE BESSON (tr. Sam Taylor)
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99, preorder now for delivery on 26 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On an island off the coast of France, six teenagers come together for a summer of desire and discovery until one of them vanishes forever, leaving the rest with an enduring mystery.

Tell me, do you know why the most beautiful love stories must always end badly?

In the summer of 1985, on a scruffy resort island off the coast of France, six teenagers—five boys and one girl—band together for a final golden season before adulthood. Their days are drenched in sun and freedom, and their nights simmer with secrets, jealousy, and longing. Philippe is drawn to Nicolas, the quiet new boy who sees him in a way that no one else does. As their bond deepens, part of Nicolas remains unreachable—until a sudden tragedy brings their summer to a brutal end.

The Summer Boy is a lush and unforgettable autobiographical tale, capturing the ineffable summers of youth in amber. Celebrated novelist Philippe Besson has shaped his memories into an aching meditation on how one summer night—and one fierce connection—can echo across a lifetime.

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My Review: Author Besson, a mere stripling of fifty-nine, recalls That One Summer. We've all had it: the moment when all the boundaries and all the relationships change, whether at eighteen or forty-two or in winter, in Louisville, Kentucky, on vacation, or waiting for your bus to come. Falling in love often does the trick. Getting a crush can, too, but so can the ordinary murkiness of passing time in good company. It's a defining moment. It can, usually does in my own lived experience, change you and your thinking about the whole rest of your life.

Where Lie With Me was a récit about Philippe's very first true love, this is a récit about how love is not plot armor and no matter how it ends, love is always going to wind bonds and webs and fetters around among between the people in your life. Philippe, as in Lie With Me, is both author and character in equal measure. Here he is eighteen and having that magical last summer of childhood freedom before adulthood tightens around him. François is a close friend whom Philippe is a rival of without being in any way deliberate about it; Alice, a new friend of both boys, is enamored of Phillipe and by François, in that eternal tangle that (depressingly enough) persists in happening over and over during one's lifetime. Nicolas, a friend of François', is fascinating to Philippe, but he's sexually interested by Alice's brother Marc. And that soap opera is where we stay all story long as events unfold.

That sounds more kinetic than this story is. Events are, in this context, mostly off-screen/page; we're here for the feels or else we're in the wrong book. As it's Philippe's récit the feelings are all his but he's astute so he reports on others' lives and feelings with acuity and compassion. Of course Author Philippe is discussing the past so it's the adult who evokes those feelings for his long-ago companions, but I felt as though character-Philippe was empathetic enough to have experienced his friends' feelings with interest and compassion.

Regret for things ill-done or, worse, un-done is one of the most maturing experiences in a person's life. It's truly a before-and-after moment to realize you have seen signs of a looming disaster but done nothing to affect its outcome. Philippe did not understand that he *could* impact Nicolas' fate. He, as Author Philippe, is coming to terms with the emotional scars and the unbearably sad realization that we possess the power to alter history...if we choose to.

It sobers a person up to know for certain that another person has their life altered because of our own in/action. No wonder Author Philippe is working this seam in the story-mine of gay coming-of-age stories. He does it beautifully and with palpable emotional honesty. In under two hundred pages he brings we-the-reader into full contact with the summer everything changed for him. It was a wrenching thing that changed his life. It's not sensationalized but it's not like there was room to do that in this page count...yet I got the impression there was little self-protecting editing of his personal memories. He was honest, our author, and gave us true biz about his life.

It made for a very good story to start my #PrideMonth reviewing with.

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain, elegy for a life spent without

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain
JEREMY SEABROOK
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1950s suburban England, a friendship bloomed between Jeremy Seabrook and Michael O’Neill—two gay men coming of age at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. Their relationship was inflected by secrecy and fear; the shadows that had distorted their adolescent years were never wholly dispelled, long into their adult life. Lyrical, candid and poignant, this is a tale of sexual identity, working-class history and family drama. A memoir of unparalleled authenticity, Private Worlds is an elegy for a doomed friendship.

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My Review: The US class system impacted me far less than the UK version did young Seabrook, thank all the nonexistent gods. The possession or absence of a "posh" accent is greatly deterministic of one's future; the comparable thing here is the Southern twang, which (no matter where the business is centered) will keep one in the lower ranks. I, being gay and really unwilling to pretend otherwise, felt the sting of exclusion, so that reality was shared by the author and me. His eventual success has been built on being a self not supported by the world he came from; escape by jettisoning the weight of his class identity. Seabrook and O'Neill each accomplished this by being bolshie leftists in an England that was convulsing from the wounds of Empire, birthing today's hideous US-style fascist plutocratic class system.

That doomed, deep love, found and lost early, was part of my life as well. The friendship blighted by the need to dissemble; the deeper connection denied by the caustic effects of powerlessness, of the absence of role models for doing the open and honest thing by each other, was all too painfully relatable to me. It's shocking to me, looking back, that my life was not more blighted by this distorting pressure to be someone I was not and, moreover, did not ever want to be...his life, from my outsider point of view, was more so than mine.

That story is not mine to tell. Author Seabrook and O'Neill have a longstanding public connection, and have each analyzed the way their milieu had them jointly "fail{ing} to grow up together"...a phrase, and an idea behind it, I'd like to pay honor to by saying I wish to hell I'd said that first. The class system's role in this failure was, probably because I'm from the US, not as real as was the way the precocious thwarted-single-mother-raised boy was forced to dissemble. His friendship with O'Neill, ostensibly the focus of this book, feels more like a well-polished lens for him to examine himself and his failed world-beating dreams.

Seabrook and O'Neill (born and raised a Londoner, a key component of his identity as an outsider in the English North) affected a caustic ironical distance from their neighbors. An intellectual pose of studying these Others, who in their turn Othered these bumptious boys for being queer, froze into an outsider identity, an observer stance, that would enable them to "overcome" their background only by treating it as fodder, material for their real life's work in sociological study. Dealing with this really unappealing trait now, Author Seabrook seems paralyzed by his recognition of its cruelty. That this is cruelty returned for cruelty given is not, to my surprise, part of his path to self-forgviness. The ironic separation has an inevitable distancing effect between the friends...how could it not...and that gets his focus. I was surprised by how bitterly he seems to regret the dark space left by O'Neill's separate personhood, and how little kindness he seems to extend to that early Seabrook boy. Judging one's earlier self is easy. Forgiving them is, apparently, not.

A fascinating dive into an intelligent man's past love for his intellectual equal and emotional opposite. I'm sure anyone who's read and liked Édouard Louis or Jon Fosse as tellers of personal and immutable truth will batten on this book.