November 1st, 2002

Set in the fifties, Frank Deford's new novel An American Summer tells the story of a young boy who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a woman striken with polio. The boy, fourteen-year-old Christy Bannister is uprooted from his boyhood home to go live with his father in Baltimore. Before he is able to make new friends he finds himself rescuing a dog that turns out to belong to a woman named Kathryn Slade, a woman whose swimming pool is a gathering place for neighborhood kids. However Kathryn herself is confined to an iron lung. Over the course of the summer, Kathryn becomes Christy's closest friend and helps him overcome many of the toughest hurdles of adolescence.

Deford is the author of a number of books, including Big Bill Tilden: The Triumph and the Tragedy, Love and Infamy: A Novel of Pearl Harbour, and The Spy in Deuce Court.