*Chatto & Windus Super-Lead Debut 2027*

'Calls to mind Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Lily King’s Heart the Lover... a luminous novel of friendship, grief, faith, family, and the earthquake that is first love' JENNY JACKSON, author of Pineapple Street

Three best friends. Endless golden summers. The August they never talk about.

It’s an accident that brings Maud, Connor and Gideon together on their first day of college. From that moment on, the three are inseparable.

Golden boy Connor begins to step off the path so carefully mapped out for him.

Quiet, steadfast Gideon meets the two people he can trust with his most painful secret.

Sharp, brilliant Maud finds the family she has always craved.

Every August, they return to pick blueberries at Gideon’s family farm. It becomes their refuge – from expectation, the future and the increasingly complicated shape of their feelings for one another.

Until, one summer, everything changes.

Years later, a girl arrives at the farm searching for answers. As the past starts catching up with them, the three friends are forced to confront the question they have avoided for decades: what really happened that August?