Indian Summer

In his forties and still a bachelor, Theodore Colville is at loose ends after selling his Indiana newspaper. He decides to go back to Florence, Italy, where two decades ago a love affair of his ended badly. Soon after returning, he runs into an old friend, Evalina Bowen, who knew the girl who jilted him and who is now a chaperone for Imogene Graham, a girl of about twenty. Imogene is exciting and fresh and very earnest, and soon Colville and she are seeing more of each other. But it's unclear if they can overcome the difference in their ages and experience, what their relationship amounts to, and what they really mean to each other. William Dean Howells wrote Indian Summer when he was in his forties himself, after a trip to Italy he took with his family. Because of its warmth and its generous ending, it remains one of his more well-loved novels. As John Updike put it, "A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy and more gracious acceptance of life's irrevocability." Perfect for readers who love nuanced romantic literature and richly atmospheric historical fiction set in beautiful Italy. Howells masterfully captures the complexity of love across generations and the bittersweet nature of second chances, making this a compelling read for anyone who appreciates thoughtful character studies and the timeless appeal of Florence as a backdrop for affairs of the heart. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)