Summer Of The Cicada
  • Published: 1 May 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099472230
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $19.99

Summer Of The Cicada

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'A new, dark and disturbing voice' - Bernard MacLaverty

It's 1987 and Joseph Pullman and his parents have just moved to Maritime, Maryland. This is white-picket-fence America, but for fifteen-year-old Joseph the threat of violence at home is as unrelenting as the punishment he receives at school, and his mother is slowly slipping away from reality.

Joseph forms an uneasy friendship with the awkward Dean Gillespie and the boys occupy themselves burying animal corpses at the Killing Tree. This is the summer the cicadas are due to come out of their seventeen-year hibernation and Joseph becomes convinced that their arrival will bring his salvation. Meanwhile, Mother is gone and Joseph's father has retreated to his basement workshop.

When a local boy goes missing and is finally found unconscious in the woods, Maritime is shaken. Then a second boy disappears and the residents of the town are forced to confront the secrets of the Pullmans' house.
  • Published: 1 May 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099472230
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Will Napier

Will Napier has split his adult life between Scotland and America. He now resides in Atlantic Beach, Florida with his wife and four children. His first novel, Summer of the Cicada, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2005 and his second, Without Warning, in 2012. He is completing a collection of short fiction titled Living With the Good Eye Closed and is writing his third novel.

Also by Will Napier

Without Warning
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Praise for Summer Of The Cicada

Like To Kill a Mockingbird rewritten from the viewpoint of Boo Radley

Scotland on Sunday

'An American version of Iain Banks' Wasp Factory' Rachel Hore, Guardian

The opening scene of Summer of the Cicada lodges itself in the mind and stays there until the final page... the ferocity of the violence, combined with the matter-of-fact way the scene unfolds, leaves an unforgettble impression... It is a measure of the artistry Will Napier brings to his first novel that the harrowing subject matter does not make for a depressing read

Sunday Telegraph

Supremely well imagined...Frequently brilliant and consistently unsettling, Summer of the Cicada will remain with you for quite a while

Independent

Brilliantly disturbing

Scotsman

'The power of the world Summer of the Cicada creates is bleak and undeniable' Sunday Herald

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