The Summer Boy
A summer built on movement and ease continues after a disappearance, leaving the narrator fixed on a gap that cannot be explained.
Hardcover · 208 pages · July 2026 · Scribner
The disappearance the summer cannot absorb
Philippe Besson returns to a familiar structure: an adult narrator, a summer in the 1980s, a male presence that draws attention. The opening of The Summer Boy suggests Lie With Me. What diverges is what the novel asks of that structure
Philippe arrives on a small French island in the summer of 1985, eighteen, between school and whatever follows. The holiday town is familiar: the same beach, the same café, the same group of boys settling into seasonal rhythm.
Nicolas arrives from elsewhere, quiet, out of step and difficult to read. He is absorbed into the group without difficulty. They walk, sit, watch and exchange fragments that do not build into anything stable.
This is not a novel organised around a gay relationship. Philippe’s attraction to Nicolas is present and accepted within the group without drama. It does not shape events or generate pressure. Desire is there, but it does not organise the book. This decision clarifies what the novel tests: not what happens between two people, but what a social world built on lightness and impermanence can absorb.
On this island, leaving is routine. People arrive, stay briefly and move on. Nothing binds. That ease is the condition Besson puts under pressure.
The prose is clean and observational. Short sentences. Careful attention to surface. It suits the setting, and for long stretches it keeps the novel at a level distance that reads as drift.
Nicolas carries fragments that do not cohere: failed exams, a year of being bullied, a life he does not explain. His opacity is not mystery deployed for effect. It is the condition of a person whose context the group does not ask for and the narration does not supply.
The break occurs at a nightclub. Nicolas declines a girl’s attention, leaves the room and does not return. A question recurs: where did he go. The search thins quickly. Police confirm some of what Nicolas mentioned, including the bullying and a conflict from his school, and withhold the rest.
The island resumes, towels filling the beach again. Conversations move on. Shock passes, not from indifference, but because the arrangement they live inside has no mechanism for holding what has happened. The world continues. Nicolas is outside it.
That choice to leave the disappearance without resolution, and to let the social world close over the gap, is the novel’s structural commitment. It is also the source of its limiting problem.
Besson keeps the prose level even as pressure builds. The discipline is deliberate. The world’s failure to mark what has happened is the point.
A novel that rejects escalation at the level of events must find it elsewhere, in language and in the pressure the narration places on its own refusals. The Summer Boy does not do this with sufficient consistency. The observation stays clean and does not sharpen. Long sections read as record rather than argument.
When Besson writes that the arrangement cannot change to meet what has happened, the line is clear. It still wants more friction than the surrounding sentences allow.
Philippe circles the absence. He tests explanations that do make sense. Memory repeats rather than resolves. Others build lives. Nicolas remains fixed at the point of disappearance, defined by what cannot be known.
A man glimpsed in the street prompts pursuit without certainty. The past has not closed. It has stalled.
What remains is a novel that declines to convert loss into story. The disappearance is not explained, not organised and not absorbed. The world stays intact. The gap does not.
★★★☆☆
ARC provided by NetGalley and Simon and Schuster UK | Scribner UK