In the summer of 1918, with the Germans threatening Paris, Edward Steichen arrives in France to photograph the war for the American army. France is full of poignant memories: his early artistic successes, his marriage, the births of his two daughters. But as he takes up his first command, he learns that his wife Clara has filed suit against her friend, the painter Marion Beckett, charging that she was Steichen's lover in the summer before the war.
Flying over the fields of France, Steichen struggles to understand what went wrong in his seemingly idyllic life. His search for answers takes him into his own complex past, toward a painful self-understanding and the discovery of new ways of seeing the world.
Told with the elegance of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and the historical rendering of Colm Toibin's The Master, The Last Summer of the World captures the life and heart of a great photographer and of a world beset by war.
- ISBN10 0393247899
- ISBN13 9780393247893
- Publish Date 17 July 2008 (first published 5 June 2007)
- Publish Status Active
- Imprint W. W. Norton & Company
- Format eBook
- Pages 400
- Language English