Publisher's Synopsis
"With brutal honesty and wit, Pilkington wonderfully depicts the male mind struggling to navigate that perilous junction where sex and love intersect." Jonathan Tropper, Author of This Is Where I Leave You "Summer Shares is a fun read but not afraid of darker undercurrents which surface at the end. With precise, easy-flowing prose, Kevin Pilkington brings us quickly into the world where his lead character is a slightly naive young man who wants love, sex and companionship but not necessarily in that order. In fact, like many young men of that time and even now, the exact order of those significant wants is never really clear. And that confusion is what lies at the very heart of male loneliness. Love doesn't always lead to sex and sex doesn't always lead to love. Summer Shares is about just that, 'sharing' and what companionship really means." Richard Vetere, Author of The Third Miracle It was 1981 and Chris MacCauley was nursing a broken heart, a bruised ego and his own post-adolescent resistance to his rite of passage into adult maturity. This satiric novel grapples with the social and sexual issues that confront the lives of a group of young New Yorkers who share a beach house in The Hamptons from Memorial to Labor Day. It is during that summer when The Hamptons just began to grow in popularity before becoming the exclusive enclave it is today. The narrator and central character, in a voice reminiscent of the first person "J.D. Salinger narrative style," is wounded from a disastrous love affair with his ex-girlfriend, Laura. He decides that spending a summer in the Hamptons would be the best emotional therapy he could undertake. As the novel unfolds we learn about the other share members through Chris' interactions with them. We discover their restlessness and passions as they go about searching for a "significant other." All their passionate and, often times, humorous dramas are staged on the beaches, at the parties, and at the "hot spots" of the Hamptons. Through his nostalgic voice Chris' world unfolds in an entertaining series of flashbacks, complete with male vulnerabilities, insecurities and the role ego plays in moments of self-clarity: "Most men grow old but not all mature." He also offers glimpses of his life with the materialistic Laura and his inability to let go. He realizes that learning how to let go might be where the maturing process will begin for him. With wit, emotion, laughter and tears, during the course of the summer, Chris experiences a lot more than he bargained for."
