Description:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000. First Houghton Mifflin. Hardback, Dustjacket. Very Good. Slight wear from storage..
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different
Summary
Ashley Warlick's prizewinning first novel, THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS, won nationwide acclaim for its portrayal of a young woman both smart and loving. Gail Godwin declared it "an occasion for rejoicing, as fresh and needed as rain after a drought." THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE also centers on a woman who thinks fast and trusts herself, in a page-turning story that stretches over a feverish southern summer. Lindy Jain is pragmatic, willful, and drawn up short on the threshold of happiness. When her beloved sister, June, is murdered in the months before Lindy is to be married, nothing can be made right again. In a desperate decision, Lindy abandons her hometown of Charlotte -- her job, her fiance, her shattered family, and her shifty brother-in-law -- for the heat of the Texas coast and the chance to leave her grief behind. She takes with her the one thing in the world that still ties her to her sister: June's son, not yet a year old. Her destination is Galveston and her ailing grandmother's huge, vacant house, where she hopes to disappear. But Galveston is not as sparkling and simple a place as it was when Lindy played there as a child, and newfound romance takes her completely by surprise. What she wants is to start over clean, but what she learns is how enduring our ties are to the ones we love, across time, across distance, and ultimately across death itself.
Details
- Title The Summer After June
- Author Warlick, Ashley
- Binding Trade Cloth
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 254
- Language EN
- Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston
- Date 2000-01-04
- ISBN 9780395926901
Excerpt
Their last night, he told her how leavings have several virtues.
This is the way it will be, he said.
Come morning and her driving, the sun will warm her fingertips on the wheel of that big car and it'll be as if he's there, inside that sun, inside her fingertips. He'll take up in the thinnest parts of her, and he told her to name those parts: the beds of her nails, the roots of her hairs, the vessels, the bones. He told her he'd run that space like it was all his own, and he'd keep running until she felt it, until she shivered and swelled just a bit bigger to be full with him.
Their last night, he told her he would always be with her, whether she was here or there or not.
I'll make it easy for you, he said. This is for keeps.
Orrin has come to her this way every morning since she left him, every morning for three in a row. He's steadfast about his promises, and she's been made to feel it, made to be grateful and trusting in sweeter, higher things. She drives I-10 with the sun rising in her windows, trimming the Gulf Coast deltas, she and the baby. This is the last span of highway they'll need to be on for a while, and she wonders how Orrin will come to her when she's not behind the wheel of this car, when she has no need for travel in the early hours of the day.
In Galveston he said, You'll think of me in morning times most often, and she said, Yes, I will, but that's not been true. She thinks of him all the time, or not at all, the way your brain thinks to beat your heart or breathe air into your lungs without your knowing it. There's the feather he tucked beneath the visor in her car, a green feather, from one of his birds. So many little things bring Orrin.
They still talk inside her head, conversations quiet and simple in the coolness. It's enough to keep her driving long into the distance so as to listen and to speak.
He'll say, I know how it would be if you hit the water from a height, like if you fell, or dove from a cliff.
Then she'll say, How would that be, and she'll whisper, as if he's just so close to her, as if he could hear her think those words, and maybe back in Galveston he can.
He'll say, You'd be falling and falling and all drawn up in yourself and ready to hit that water like it was a brick wall, and then you'd just keep falling, your skin stinging and crawling off your bones, and you just falling, your lungs filled up with water instead of air.
And she'll say, That's what you think?
And he'll answer, That's how it would happen to you. Me, I'm a different story.
She'll laugh to herself, and maybe later they'll talk about another thing. There are moments she can feel his hand in hers, along her thigh and at the hollow where her neck becomes her shoulders. She hears his voice; feels his touch. She does not miss him yet, and this is why.
She has always had a high threshold for pain. Sometimes it may be hours before she realizes she's hurt herself. She has learned there is no pain out there that could bring her to her knees, that could cut her or bruise her, so she would stop what she was doing and lie down and not get up again. Pain is always loose and free and available. It will wait until she wants it.
She drives with the window of her big car rolled down, an old Loretta Lynn song turned up on the radio. The breeze is warm and sugared with early Alabama fall. She sings for the baby, his silent, sleeping company, and she thinks how soon he'll be waking up, wanting her. That's what she'll fix on until he goes to sleep again.
She is twenty-five, a quarter of something she has yet to figure out. She has been to college. She's had scientific training and knows the chemistry of common things. She moved from her parents' house when it still belonged to both of them, had a job back in Charlotte in a medical center, held a place in the solid, everyday world. Her life was coarse and complicated to her, beginning and ending so much.
These things about her have not changed since she left home. She still knows what she's always known, but added to that is Orrin, what he told her about herself. He had young, awkward things to say at first, how she was smart and strong and good and pretty, but from him she wanted to hear what she'd never heard before. So then he told her how she had a woven step, the inside of her calf brushing the back of the other like her steps were plaiting themselves to the ground, and they began walking everywhere together. He loved her. She knew it. But he said it would be just once upon a time when she went home again.
She's been gone from Charlotte since the spring, west to the Gullf of Mexico. She has not seen her fiancé, Cott, her parents, her job, or anyone she knows from home since March, and now it's fall. They all think her to be missing, to have been taken or murdddddered or hit over the head so hard she may not be herself anymore, but she is fine and well, and has been for the longest time. She didn't believe she would ever go back, but Orrin told her differently. Now she treasures all the things Orrin said as tiny nascent truths, waiting for the space to become full, to become themselves.
She drives through the night so that the baby will sleep. During the day, they take rooms in pink hotels with swimming pools and ceiling fans and laundered sheets cool from the air conditioner. She remembers the time she and Orrin brought air conditioners to her grandmother's house so they could be lovers in winter times and colder places, December, Montreal, Juneau. Now she thinks that if she reached out, he would be beside her, his head on the pillow, his body in the sheets. It's only a spell they've chosen not to break.
This carefulness with spells is the way they've always been with each other, but what they call always is just the stretch of summer out behind them. Time has passed differently. She often forgets they knew each other as children, forgets they knew each other before they were lovers, when Orrin was polite and she was desperate. Now the thing between them has grown up. She has the feeling it will be okay without her.
She takes the baby to the pool when the maid comes around. They float, she on her back and the baby pulled up on her chest, his cheek to her lips. She whispers to him how she and her sister loved their lake back home, and he trails his long toes in the water. There are often other children in the pool, boys in striped trunks with beach balls and rafts and pails they fill with water and dump on the concrete. There are women with books and sunglasses perched beneath lone umbrellas. The baby sees all this, and she's almost sure he feels no part of it. That's fine. He will be different from other boys, other men, and such is life. Such is what she's made for him.
Night comes, and they drive again. When she gets tired, she makes a point to find water - the ocean, a lake, a slow thin river good for swimming. She does it like an animal tucking in for winter, an insect spinning its cocoon. She straps the baby into his seat on the shore, skins off her clothes to pile on the sand. Distant headlights catch her whiteness, the crown of her head, the spread of her bare shoulders in the otherwise dark.
She takes to the water all at once. There is breathlessness and late summer cold, but she dives and surfaces, swims out and back. She sees Orrin in the ghosts of things beneath the surface, just beyond her reach in that spellbound way. It's in the water she feels closest to him, because it's true that all water is connected and flows around the earth in circles, and someday, she thinks, he could have this water on himself. Then, in her mind, she's connected to all the water she ever swam in, all the people she ever loved and was a part of. It is enough to make her do this every night.
When she returns to the shore and the baby, she dresses wet, wrings the water from her hair into her T-shirt, and lets her skirt cling to her legs. She takes her time. She's waiting for Orrin's sunlight to rise and take up in her the way strength might, or goodness or beauty. Then she'll gather the two of them back into the car and continue on her way.
Her name is Lindy Jain. She has left the Gulf Coast for the city of Charlotte, where she grew up, left one man she loves for another who came before him. It is not an easy thing to explain. She knows there are parts of her mind that don't necessarily meet, one thing not always leading to another. She trusts this, that our means need no present end, that sometimes you can do only for yourself. It is how she can love the man she is leaving and still leave, how she could once leave the man she was to marry and still go back now.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Ashley Warlick. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
This is the way it will be, he said.
Come morning and her driving, the sun will warm her fingertips on the wheel of that big car and it'll be as if he's there, inside that sun, inside her fingertips. He'll take up in the thinnest parts of her, and he told her to name those parts: the beds of her nails, the roots of her hairs, the vessels, the bones. He told her he'd run that space like it was all his own, and he'd keep running until she felt it, until she shivered and swelled just a bit bigger to be full with him.
Their last night, he told her he would always be with her, whether she was here or there or not.
I'll make it easy for you, he said. This is for keeps.
Orrin has come to her this way every morning since she left him, every morning for three in a row. He's steadfast about his promises, and she's been made to feel it, made to be grateful and trusting in sweeter, higher things. She drives I-10 with the sun rising in her windows, trimming the Gulf Coast deltas, she and the baby. This is the last span of highway they'll need to be on for a while, and she wonders how Orrin will come to her when she's not behind the wheel of this car, when she has no need for travel in the early hours of the day.
In Galveston he said, You'll think of me in morning times most often, and she said, Yes, I will, but that's not been true. She thinks of him all the time, or not at all, the way your brain thinks to beat your heart or breathe air into your lungs without your knowing it. There's the feather he tucked beneath the visor in her car, a green feather, from one of his birds. So many little things bring Orrin.
They still talk inside her head, conversations quiet and simple in the coolness. It's enough to keep her driving long into the distance so as to listen and to speak.
He'll say, I know how it would be if you hit the water from a height, like if you fell, or dove from a cliff.
Then she'll say, How would that be, and she'll whisper, as if he's just so close to her, as if he could hear her think those words, and maybe back in Galveston he can.
He'll say, You'd be falling and falling and all drawn up in yourself and ready to hit that water like it was a brick wall, and then you'd just keep falling, your skin stinging and crawling off your bones, and you just falling, your lungs filled up with water instead of air.
And she'll say, That's what you think?
And he'll answer, That's how it would happen to you. Me, I'm a different story.
She'll laugh to herself, and maybe later they'll talk about another thing. There are moments she can feel his hand in hers, along her thigh and at the hollow where her neck becomes her shoulders. She hears his voice; feels his touch. She does not miss him yet, and this is why.
She has always had a high threshold for pain. Sometimes it may be hours before she realizes she's hurt herself. She has learned there is no pain out there that could bring her to her knees, that could cut her or bruise her, so she would stop what she was doing and lie down and not get up again. Pain is always loose and free and available. It will wait until she wants it.
She drives with the window of her big car rolled down, an old Loretta Lynn song turned up on the radio. The breeze is warm and sugared with early Alabama fall. She sings for the baby, his silent, sleeping company, and she thinks how soon he'll be waking up, wanting her. That's what she'll fix on until he goes to sleep again.
She is twenty-five, a quarter of something she has yet to figure out. She has been to college. She's had scientific training and knows the chemistry of common things. She moved from her parents' house when it still belonged to both of them, had a job back in Charlotte in a medical center, held a place in the solid, everyday world. Her life was coarse and complicated to her, beginning and ending so much.
These things about her have not changed since she left home. She still knows what she's always known, but added to that is Orrin, what he told her about herself. He had young, awkward things to say at first, how she was smart and strong and good and pretty, but from him she wanted to hear what she'd never heard before. So then he told her how she had a woven step, the inside of her calf brushing the back of the other like her steps were plaiting themselves to the ground, and they began walking everywhere together. He loved her. She knew it. But he said it would be just once upon a time when she went home again.
She's been gone from Charlotte since the spring, west to the Gullf of Mexico. She has not seen her fiancé, Cott, her parents, her job, or anyone she knows from home since March, and now it's fall. They all think her to be missing, to have been taken or murdddddered or hit over the head so hard she may not be herself anymore, but she is fine and well, and has been for the longest time. She didn't believe she would ever go back, but Orrin told her differently. Now she treasures all the things Orrin said as tiny nascent truths, waiting for the space to become full, to become themselves.
She drives through the night so that the baby will sleep. During the day, they take rooms in pink hotels with swimming pools and ceiling fans and laundered sheets cool from the air conditioner. She remembers the time she and Orrin brought air conditioners to her grandmother's house so they could be lovers in winter times and colder places, December, Montreal, Juneau. Now she thinks that if she reached out, he would be beside her, his head on the pillow, his body in the sheets. It's only a spell they've chosen not to break.
This carefulness with spells is the way they've always been with each other, but what they call always is just the stretch of summer out behind them. Time has passed differently. She often forgets they knew each other as children, forgets they knew each other before they were lovers, when Orrin was polite and she was desperate. Now the thing between them has grown up. She has the feeling it will be okay without her.
She takes the baby to the pool when the maid comes around. They float, she on her back and the baby pulled up on her chest, his cheek to her lips. She whispers to him how she and her sister loved their lake back home, and he trails his long toes in the water. There are often other children in the pool, boys in striped trunks with beach balls and rafts and pails they fill with water and dump on the concrete. There are women with books and sunglasses perched beneath lone umbrellas. The baby sees all this, and she's almost sure he feels no part of it. That's fine. He will be different from other boys, other men, and such is life. Such is what she's made for him.
Night comes, and they drive again. When she gets tired, she makes a point to find water - the ocean, a lake, a slow thin river good for swimming. She does it like an animal tucking in for winter, an insect spinning its cocoon. She straps the baby into his seat on the shore, skins off her clothes to pile on the sand. Distant headlights catch her whiteness, the crown of her head, the spread of her bare shoulders in the otherwise dark.
She takes to the water all at once. There is breathlessness and late summer cold, but she dives and surfaces, swims out and back. She sees Orrin in the ghosts of things beneath the surface, just beyond her reach in that spellbound way. It's in the water she feels closest to him, because it's true that all water is connected and flows around the earth in circles, and someday, she thinks, he could have this water on himself. Then, in her mind, she's connected to all the water she ever swam in, all the people she ever loved and was a part of. It is enough to make her do this every night.
When she returns to the shore and the baby, she dresses wet, wrings the water from her hair into her T-shirt, and lets her skirt cling to her legs. She takes her time. She's waiting for Orrin's sunlight to rise and take up in her the way strength might, or goodness or beauty. Then she'll gather the two of them back into the car and continue on her way.
Her name is Lindy Jain. She has left the Gulf Coast for the city of Charlotte, where she grew up, left one man she loves for another who came before him. It is not an easy thing to explain. She knows there are parts of her mind that don't necessarily meet, one thing not always leading to another. She trusts this, that our means need no present end, that sometimes you can do only for yourself. It is how she can love the man she is leaving and still leave, how she could once leave the man she was to marry and still go back now.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Ashley Warlick. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Media reviews
Ashley Warlick's first book, "The Distance From the Heart of Things" won Houghton Mifflin's Literary Fellowship when the author was just 23. It was the kind of success that some young writers have trouble living down. But Warlick's second novel makes good on and surpasses the promise of the first. Boston Globe
"THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE by Ashley Warlick is a strong, moving novel about a young independent minded, courageous, gritty woman who, in despair over the murder of her sister takes her sister's baby and leaves home in Carolina to make a new life for the both of them on the Gulf coast. Lindy is a fierce, honest, winning character and the life she makes with love, a romantic spirit and determination is a triumph. A wonderful read, a wise and redemptive story." -- Susan Richards Shreve, author of WILL OF THEIR OWN, THE GIFT OF THE GIRL WHO COULDN'T HEAR and PLUM & JAGGERS Booklist, ALA
"...Warlick, (whose first novel, The Distance From the Heart of Things, was praised for its maturity and eloquence) has more ambitious aims in mind: to illuminate the lives and hearts of those whom love has damaged, to discoer whether healing and transformation can occur despite, or perhaps alongside, the presumed finality of death....What sets the novel apart is Warlick's writing, quietly haunting, infused with a knack for the unexpected image and an understanding of the core of human nature, which subverts what we think we know of women like Lindy and men like Orrin and the complex choices they make in the name of love." -- January 16, 2000 -- By Paula L. Woods The Los Angeles Times
"...Warlcik's novel succeeds in tenderly depicting the mysterious bonds of love and family." The New York Times
"Ashley Warlick lives deeply in the beautiful and carpentered sentences she uses to write her books. THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE is even better than THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS, which was one of the best first novels of the past ten years. Warlick does that most uncommon thing: she grows better and deeper with each book." -- Pat Conroy
"Stories about starting over again, about self-discovery, have a tendency to veer off into sentimentalism. Not to worry. This is not one of those aimless tales of truck-stop gurus and long-winded philosophical asides delivered while searching for the self." The Chicago Tribune
"The nexus of the heat-and-humidity index often produces novels of feverish isolation, and Warlick's second book falls into this category. When Lindy Jain's older sister, June, is murdered, her barely comprehensible reaction is to light off to Galveston, where she spent summers as a child, with June's baby boy in tow. Her attempt to re-create her happy girlhood includes romancing an old family friend, camping out in her grandmother's crumbling house, and refusing to talk to her mother. There is an overabundance of incident here, but Lindy's convoluted responses to almost everything around her are so well drawn and so intimate that her breath practically riffles the pages." February 14, 2000 The New Yorker
"...the haunting tale of one woman's heartbreaking journey into the many realms of love, confirms Warlick's talent, first glimpsed in her debut THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS..." Publishers Weekly, Starred
"There's plenty to like and admire about this book." The Baltimore Sun
"Warlick writes with sometimes breathtaking maturity in a voice eloquent with knowledge and understanding" The San Francisco Chronicle
"The writing is lovely and languid, with past and present seamlessly drifting back and forth. The physical settings in steamy Galveston are described so vividly that the bright sun could almost make you squint." USA Today
"At 25, grief-stricken, Lindy Jain kidnaps her murdered sister June's baby and flees a nursing job and fiance in Charlotte, N.C., to hide out in the empty house in Galveston, Tex., where the girls visited their grandmother every summer. Adding to her angst is an unexpected pregnancy of her own, and a budding love affair with a summer playmate grown into a sexy landscape gardener. Warlick (whose acclaimed debut, The Distance From the Heart of Things, won a Houghton MIfflin Literary Fellowship) has written a sensual, moody love story that occasionally wilts beneath its own intensity, as heavy and huid as the Gulf Coast Heat. B" -RJ Entertainment Weekly
"Warlick brings to her fiction an extraordinary talent for persuasive storytelling, plumbing the depths of her characters and evoking the subtle pull of family and place." Newsday
"After the brutal murder of her sister, June, Lindy abandons her home, her career and her fiance in Charlotte, steals her dead sister's baby son and heads for her grandmother's huge, empty house on the Gulf Coast of Texas. In spite of a sometimes shaky plot--which includes a hurricane and an affair with a childhood friend with seccrets of his own--the story is compelling. Warlick's first novel, "The Distance From the Heart of Things" (1996) woon the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship when she was only 23. Not yet 30, Warlick is impressively confident with lush, emotional prose: "She would stretch her heart like a rubber band until it snapped, and then she would start over, all the way over, from the inside out." -- January 23, 2000 Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Lindy's desire to escape-to float away from the pain and emptiness she's felt since June's death-runs through Warlick's many long and lyrically structured sentences. By describing Lindy's thoughts even more closely than her actions, Warlick allows readers to share the character's responses to the sudden transformation of her world and to understand her motivations. 'There are parts of Lindy's mind that don't necessarily meet,' Warlick writes, 'one thing not always leading to another.' Yet despite this, Lindy carries on-and most readers will follow thanks to Warlick's deft and compelling rendering of character." February 6, 2000 Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"A writer of enormous talent and wisdom. Warlick's fiercely independent voice may be the best literary news in a long, long time." Cleveland Plain Dealer
null Midwest Book Review
"June is dead. For Lindy Jain, that changes everything. Lindy often encounters death in her work as a nurse at a large Charlotte Medical center, but one day the face she encounters is heart-breakingly familiar. An intruder has murdered her older sister, June. Rather than wait for grief's slow erosion, Lindy decides to make a clean break from her own heart's turmoil. She kidnaps June's baby and flees Charlotte, leaving no explanation for her parnts or fiance. She and the baby land in Galveston, where the two sisters spent childhood summers visiting their grandmother. While thre, Lindy reconnects with Orrin, a constant third in those early adventures with June. Through Orrin's eyes, LIndy reconsiders her desperate views on life and love--eand even on those "simple summers" in Galveston. In the end, she, like the reader, learns that events are rarely as they first seem." Southern Living
"THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE by Ashley Warlick is a strong, moving novel about a young independent minded, courageous, gritty woman who, in despair over the murder of her sister takes her sister's baby and leaves home in Carolina to make a new life for the both of them on the Gulf coast. Lindy is a fierce, honest, winning character and the life she makes with love, a romantic spirit and determination is a triumph. A wonderful read, a wise and redemptive story." -- Susan Richards Shreve, author of WILL OF THEIR OWN, THE GIFT OF THE GIRL WHO COULDN'T HEAR and PLUM & JAGGERS Booklist, ALA
"...Warlick, (whose first novel, The Distance From the Heart of Things, was praised for its maturity and eloquence) has more ambitious aims in mind: to illuminate the lives and hearts of those whom love has damaged, to discoer whether healing and transformation can occur despite, or perhaps alongside, the presumed finality of death....What sets the novel apart is Warlick's writing, quietly haunting, infused with a knack for the unexpected image and an understanding of the core of human nature, which subverts what we think we know of women like Lindy and men like Orrin and the complex choices they make in the name of love." -- January 16, 2000 -- By Paula L. Woods The Los Angeles Times
"...Warlcik's novel succeeds in tenderly depicting the mysterious bonds of love and family." The New York Times
"Ashley Warlick lives deeply in the beautiful and carpentered sentences she uses to write her books. THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE is even better than THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS, which was one of the best first novels of the past ten years. Warlick does that most uncommon thing: she grows better and deeper with each book." -- Pat Conroy
"Stories about starting over again, about self-discovery, have a tendency to veer off into sentimentalism. Not to worry. This is not one of those aimless tales of truck-stop gurus and long-winded philosophical asides delivered while searching for the self." The Chicago Tribune
"The nexus of the heat-and-humidity index often produces novels of feverish isolation, and Warlick's second book falls into this category. When Lindy Jain's older sister, June, is murdered, her barely comprehensible reaction is to light off to Galveston, where she spent summers as a child, with June's baby boy in tow. Her attempt to re-create her happy girlhood includes romancing an old family friend, camping out in her grandmother's crumbling house, and refusing to talk to her mother. There is an overabundance of incident here, but Lindy's convoluted responses to almost everything around her are so well drawn and so intimate that her breath practically riffles the pages." February 14, 2000 The New Yorker
"...the haunting tale of one woman's heartbreaking journey into the many realms of love, confirms Warlick's talent, first glimpsed in her debut THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS..." Publishers Weekly, Starred
"There's plenty to like and admire about this book." The Baltimore Sun
"Warlick writes with sometimes breathtaking maturity in a voice eloquent with knowledge and understanding" The San Francisco Chronicle
"The writing is lovely and languid, with past and present seamlessly drifting back and forth. The physical settings in steamy Galveston are described so vividly that the bright sun could almost make you squint." USA Today
"At 25, grief-stricken, Lindy Jain kidnaps her murdered sister June's baby and flees a nursing job and fiance in Charlotte, N.C., to hide out in the empty house in Galveston, Tex., where the girls visited their grandmother every summer. Adding to her angst is an unexpected pregnancy of her own, and a budding love affair with a summer playmate grown into a sexy landscape gardener. Warlick (whose acclaimed debut, The Distance From the Heart of Things, won a Houghton MIfflin Literary Fellowship) has written a sensual, moody love story that occasionally wilts beneath its own intensity, as heavy and huid as the Gulf Coast Heat. B" -RJ Entertainment Weekly
"Warlick brings to her fiction an extraordinary talent for persuasive storytelling, plumbing the depths of her characters and evoking the subtle pull of family and place." Newsday
"After the brutal murder of her sister, June, Lindy abandons her home, her career and her fiance in Charlotte, steals her dead sister's baby son and heads for her grandmother's huge, empty house on the Gulf Coast of Texas. In spite of a sometimes shaky plot--which includes a hurricane and an affair with a childhood friend with seccrets of his own--the story is compelling. Warlick's first novel, "The Distance From the Heart of Things" (1996) woon the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship when she was only 23. Not yet 30, Warlick is impressively confident with lush, emotional prose: "She would stretch her heart like a rubber band until it snapped, and then she would start over, all the way over, from the inside out." -- January 23, 2000 Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Lindy's desire to escape-to float away from the pain and emptiness she's felt since June's death-runs through Warlick's many long and lyrically structured sentences. By describing Lindy's thoughts even more closely than her actions, Warlick allows readers to share the character's responses to the sudden transformation of her world and to understand her motivations. 'There are parts of Lindy's mind that don't necessarily meet,' Warlick writes, 'one thing not always leading to another.' Yet despite this, Lindy carries on-and most readers will follow thanks to Warlick's deft and compelling rendering of character." February 6, 2000 Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"A writer of enormous talent and wisdom. Warlick's fiercely independent voice may be the best literary news in a long, long time." Cleveland Plain Dealer
null Midwest Book Review
"June is dead. For Lindy Jain, that changes everything. Lindy often encounters death in her work as a nurse at a large Charlotte Medical center, but one day the face she encounters is heart-breakingly familiar. An intruder has murdered her older sister, June. Rather than wait for grief's slow erosion, Lindy decides to make a clean break from her own heart's turmoil. She kidnaps June's baby and flees Charlotte, leaving no explanation for her parnts or fiance. She and the baby land in Galveston, where the two sisters spent childhood summers visiting their grandmother. While thre, Lindy reconnects with Orrin, a constant third in those early adventures with June. Through Orrin's eyes, LIndy reconsiders her desperate views on life and love--eand even on those "simple summers" in Galveston. In the end, she, like the reader, learns that events are rarely as they first seem." Southern Living
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2000. Hardcover. Very Good. Disclaimer:A copy that has been read, but remains in excellent condition. Pages are intact and are not marred by notes or highlighting, but may contain a neat previous owner name. The spine remains undamaged. At ThriftBooks, our motto is: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.
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The Summer after June
by Warlick, Ashley
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- Hardcover
- first
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- Used - Very Good in Very Good dust jacket
- Edition
- First Printing
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- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
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- 1
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Cooperstown, New York, United States
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New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1999. First Printing. Hardcover. 0395926904 .
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The Summer After June
by Warlick, Ashley
- Used
- Fine
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
- Condition
- Used - Fine
- Edition
- First Edition
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
- Quantity Available
- 1
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Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/fine. hardcover. SIGNED by the author and dated in the year of publication on the title page. Slight bumping to spine ends, still a tight fine copy in a fine dust jacket which is now covered in mylar.
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The Summer After June
by Warlick, Ashley; Ashley Warlick
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- Hardcover
- Condition
- Like New
- Edition
- Copyright © 2000
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- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
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The Bronx, New York, United States
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Boston, MA & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Copyright © 2000 . Hardcover. Like New/Very Good. 8vo or 8° (Medium Octavo): 7¾" x 9¾" tall. Honi Werner (Jacket Design and Illustration). 254 pp. Clean, fresh copy with very light shelf wear, crisp pages and clean text. Dj shows minimal wear.
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The Summer After June
by Ashley Warlick
- Used
- good
- Hardcover
- Condition
- Used - Good
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- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
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HOUSTON, Texas, United States
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Houghton Mifflin, 2000-01-04. Hardcover. Good.
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The Summer After June
by Ashley Warlick
- Used
- Hardcover
- Condition
- Used:Good
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
- Quantity Available
- 1
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HOUSTON, Texas, United States
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$11.49FREE shipping to USA
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Houghton Mifflin, 2000-01-04. Hardcover. Used:Good.
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The Summer After June
by Warlick, Ashley
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Used - Very Good -
- Edition
- First Printing
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
- Quantity Available
- 1
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Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Boston, MA, U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. a nice clean copy without any marks or tears; light edgewear. First Printing. Hard Cover. Very Good -/Very Good -. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.
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THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE
by Warlick, Ashley
- Used
- Fine
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Used - Fine
- Edition
- First Edition, First Printing 1st Printing
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
- Quantity Available
- 1
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Los Angeles, California, United States
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$18.00$3.50 shipping to USA
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New York, NY, U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. First Edition, First Printing 1st Printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Second novel by the author of the highly-praised THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS. Fine, unread copy, in fine, mylar-protected dust jacket. L3
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The Summer After June
by Warlick, Ashley
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Used - Very Fine
- Edition
- First Edition
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
- 9780395926901 / 0395926904
- Quantity Available
- 1
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WOODSTOCK, New York, United States
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$20.00$4.00 shipping to USA
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Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. First Edition . Hardcover. Very Fine/Very Fine. Pat conroy said that this book "is even better than 'The Distance From the Heart of Things', which was one of the best first novels of the past ten years.
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