Salt Water

"In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned."...So begins this luminous story of a young man's passage through the dark turns of adult passion. A contemporary retelling of Turgenev's classic tale "First Love," "Salt Water" is set against a summer landscape of water, sand, and sky, and relates in seductive detail the momentous events that changed a family forever.

On an isolated island off the Atlantic coast, fifteen-year-old Michael and his parents begin their customary lazy vacation. When two exquisite flirts shatter the calm, Michael experiences the provocative mysteries and the consequences of various kinds of love -- romantic and sensual, paternal and filial.

William Faulkner Award-winning author Charles Simmons explores the very heart of the human need to be wanted, the intricacies of the father-son bond, and a boy's adolescence in all of its desires, confusion, and heartbreak.