<DIV><DIV><I>"And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of</I> The Awful Truth<I>? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."</I></DIV><DIV>&#160;</DIV><DIV>Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of <I>The Summer Without Men</I>,<I> </I>has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia&#8217;s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a &#8220;pause.&#8221; This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia&#8217;s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people&#8217;s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her&#8212;her mother and her close friends,&#8220;the Five Swans,&#8221; and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband&#8212;and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. <P></P>From the internationally bestselling author of <I>What I Loved </I>comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes. <P></P></DIV></DIV>