It’s a question as old as time. If you could change the past, would you?
This is the dilemma presented to Luna in The Summer of Impossible Things, the latest compelling supernatural drama from The Time Traveller’s Wife author Rowan Coleman.
Luna’s world has been turned upside down. Her mother has committed suicide following decades of severe depression. In the attic of the family’s Oxford home Luna watches the video recorded by her late mother before her death which reveals two life-changing confessions. The first is that the man who raised Luna as his daughter is not actually her biological father. And the second? Before Luna’s birth, her mother was a carefree young Brooklyn native who moved to England in order to marry Luna’s alleged father; an action that she now considers to be the catalyst for the lifetime of depression that followed. Luna’s mother reveals that something bad happened to her in Brooklyn, and that she did something very bad in return. She implores her daughter to return to their homeland to find the other videos in existence that will reveal the truth about her mother’s former life.
Luna – a neuroscientist who recently broke off her engagement when she discovered her fiancé was unfaithful on the day of her mother’s funeral – follows her mothers wishes, taking along her witty younger sister Pea who is eight weeks sober. But Luna is hiding her own secrets. She has been having episodes; hearing voices and seeing places that she has no recollection of. A scientist by trade, Luna fears that a brain tumor or other illness is responsible for these ‘hallucinations’, but once she returns to her mother’s old stomping ground she realises there is something else at work. Luna finds herself drifting between present day and the summer of 1977, where she meets her mother as a young woman at a party just a few days before her mother is due to move to England. Confronted with the opportunity to learn the truth and prevent her mother from following the path that led to her destruction, Luna must choose whether to allow events to take their natural course or intervene and change her family’s history forever.
Funny in parts, provocative and deeply moving with characters to root for, Coleman has knocked it out of the park with this extraordinarily well written story that will hit you on just about every level.
THE SUMMER OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS / AUTHOR: ROWAN COLEMAN / PUBLISHER: EDBURY PRESS / RELEASE DATE: 29TH JUNE
