In August: A Novel

“A gorgeous, sprawling love story that calls to mind Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Lily King’s Heart the Lover . . . a luminous novel of friendship, grief, faith, family, and the earthquake that is first love. Celeste Perri has written an instant classic.”—Jenny Jackson, bestselling author of Pineapple Street and The Shampoo Effect

Before ambition, before betrayal, before heartbreak—there was August.

It’s the height of summer when a teenage girl arrives alone at the blueberry farm in Maine, the only place left that might hold answers to so many questions.

Decades earlier, on the first day of college at Brown University, three people meet, forming a friendship that will forever change their lives. Maud, Connor, and Gideon couldn’t be more different. Connor, the golden boy, is a jock who hails from the suburbs of D.C. and the genteel world of golf and country clubs. Maud, a spunky spitfire from New York City, is still trying to navigate her parents’ acrimonious divorce that always puts her in the middle of the wreckage. And Gideon, a home-schooled child of fundamentalists who live on a farm in Maine, has come to Brown to right a wrong that he knows he’ll never be able to undo. 

Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, the three become inseparable. Come August, they go to Gideon’s family farm to pick blueberries. They return again and again for 30 years, including the one summer that changes everything—and which none of them will ever talk about.

Celeste Perri’s In August is a decades-spanning tale of love and friendship that is utterly audacious and unpredictable, and announces the arrival of a remarkable new literary voice.