About the Author

David Macfarlane was born in Hamilton in 1952. He is the author of an acclaimed family memoir of Newfoundland, The Danger Tree, which won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Non-Fiction in 1992. He began his career as a writer and editor with Weekend Magazine and has since been published in Saturday Night, Maclean's, Toronto Life and Books in Canada, among others. the recipient of eleven National Magazine Awards and a Sovereign Award for Magazine Journalism, David Macfarlane is now a national columnist for The Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two children. Summer Gone is his first novel and was shortlisted for the 1999 Giller Prize.

Summer Gone was published in the New Face of Fiction program in 1999.

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Books by this author

The Danger Tree (Vintage Canada, 2000)
Summer Gone (Vintage Canada, 2000)
Summer Gone (Knopf Canada, 1999)

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Literary Awards

• Co-winner of the 2000 Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award (Summer Gone)
• Shortlisted for the 1999 Giller Prize (Summer Gone)
• Winner of the 1992 Canadian Authors' Association Award for Non-Fiction (The Danger Tree)

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Book Reviews and Quotes

Praise for Summer Gone:

"In his elegant debut novel, Summer Gone, David Macfarlane launches a metaphor that could hardly be more Canadian…he is one of the country's premier stylists…his prose is as light and flexible as a finely carved paddle, and it manifests an astonishing ability to summon the beauties of the north country."
-Maclean's

"The rough landscape of northern Ontario takes on universal dimensions in Summer Gone, David Macfarlane's expertly controlled first novel… Gently, as with a fine ghost story, Bay's complicated past is lived and relived from different points on a shadowy timeline. The pain of lost innocence ripples through this remarkable novel. A lone instance of infidelity troubles the middle-aged protagonist in ways that illustrate the price of lust, and the eroding splendor of the Canadian wilderness reflects the greed of reckless developers. Yet the book wears its themes lightly. Macfarlane animates Summer Gone with exacting descriptions of natural life… The novel's language - perfectly tuned to guilt, responsibility and transcendence - evokes the freshwater lakes and rivers that the characters navigate. Stories-within-stories gather force like tributaries. Finishing Summer Gone leaves the reader with a sense of loss - not only the loss that inheres in Bay Newling's quiet tragedy, but the loss of the narrator's good company upon reaching the final page."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Summer Gone is a homage to our most excruciating and beautiful memories. Within this novel is the marvellous height of summer, perfect and fleeting, a place and time we can never get enough of."
-The Globe and Mail

Praise for The Danger Tree:

"[David Macfarlane's] Newfoundland memoir, The Danger Tree, is easily one of the most readable and beautifully written books to emerge from Canada in recent years."
-Mordecai Richler, Saturday Night

"The Danger Tree is a masterpiece. David Macfarlane is an architect of the past, building extraordinary memory mansions in which the reader feels eerily at home."
-Alberto Manguel

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Links to Extra Resources

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