After the death of her parents, Emalee is sent to live with her aunt who spends her summers on an idyllic lake in Upstate New York. To cope with her loss, Emalee becomes emotionally detached from everyone around her. As she enters adulthood, Emalee struggles to maintain this fa ade while trying to navigate relationships with the men in her life: Peter, an artist and close friend who lacks the ambition to make his art known to anyone but himself; and Stuart - a quiet, intelligent philosopher with whom she falls in love, only to get caught up in a bizarre love triangle with his cousin, Danielle. When Danielle ends up dead from a presumed drowning, Emalee flees, and doesn't look back until years later, when she returns to confront her feelings for Stuart and unrequited love.Set among the pristine lakes of Upstate New York and the Canadian wilderness, the characters in Ephemeral Summer come to life in vivid landscapes impossible to forget.