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In her debut novel |
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A bitter-sweet Coming-of-Age novel
for teenagers and story lovers of all ages The passion and heartbreak of a young girl who dares to live her gold dark summer of love and loss and in so doing makes the transition from late childhood to early womanhood. |
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An elegy for adolescence and a simpler age, sensitive, insightful, bittersweet, and poignant. The characters are strong and engaging, the boarding school setting highly evocative, the descriptions both lyrical and filmic in their clarity." |
An eloquent novel detailing the ins and outs of an English boarding school in the late 1950s, Susan Papas’ The Gold Dark Summer is a lushly descriptive work about the delights and dangers of forbidden first love... Papas’ poignant book vividly captures the magic and excitement of youth, where every change and new experience is a dramatic opportunity for personal growth and exploration, offering a look at adolescence from a historical perspective that is wholly recognizable in the present day." 
14-year-old Sadie is a boarding-school rebel with a heart full of dreams
She defies the rules and regulations of her strict English boarding school with minor acts of disobedience: reading to room-mates after lights out, organising midnight feasts, taking part in dangerous dares. But in her fourteenth summer she will risk disgrace, the loss of friendship, exclusion from the coveted Music Festival, even expulsion from school, to go in search of the love she dreams of. When her world falls apart, she must find the strength and maturity to ride out the storm and emerge not only older and wiser, but victorious. Set in post-WWII England It is the summer of 1959, and the shadow of World War II still lingers over England, even as the girls of Junior Boarding House look forward to a new decade with the promise of a brighter, more liberated future. Sadie is a dreamer. She dreams that one day the father she has never known will return, even though he was killed in WWII. She dreams that Danny, a senior at the nearby boys' school, will one day notice her, but he has eyes only for her best friend, Lucy. And she dreams that she and Lucy will be selected to sing in the prestigious summer Music Festival, and win. |
We enter into Sadie's world, share her experience and empathise with her traumas, but at the same time we can recognise the functionality of these traumas in her gradual passage into adulthood." |
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Extract
"The screaming had stopped. The weeping that followed the screaming had stopped. Her mind began to float up, away from her body. She looked down and saw herself curled motionless on the floor between rows of desks, pink cotton skirt fanned out behind her as though blown by a stiff breeze and frozen into place on the bare boards. Her white ankle socks glowed in the gloom. A toppled chair lay nearby. Pages from a sketchpad were strewn across the floor, pale as stepping-stones. There would be time to face the consequences of what had happened, her mind told her. No need to think about tomorrow now. She must not think what she was in danger of losing, above all she must not think about Danny. Her exhausted body, depleted by fear and emotion, would rebuild its resources while her mind kept watch. And she would do what she did best when the going got tough. She would dream. It was Sunday, the twenty-eighth day of June, 1959. Her fourteenth birthday." |
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