One More August

In the summer of 1994, Laura Danforth left Vermont for a job in Seattle, and Jack Lavoie stayed behind to run his family’s hardware store after his father’s stroke. Neither of them waited. They married other people, raised children, built careers, and came apart from their marriages for reasons of their own.

Now Laura is fifty-five, her aunt is gone, and the lake camp the Danforths and the Lavoies have shared since 1962 has to be emptied and sold. Laura comes back for one August to do the work: the closets, the old logbooks, the family arguments, the vote.

Jack is fifty-eight. He still lives eight miles from the lake. He still knows how to fix the pump.

Between repairs, a difficult offer on the camp, grown children with opinions of their own, and long evenings on the dock, Laura and Jack discover that what they remember about each other is no longer the point. The people they were at twenty-five are gone. The question is whether the people they became would choose each other now, and what each of them would have to change to find out.

One More August is a warm, grown-up novel about love later in life, family places, and the difference between remembering a life and choosing one.