In an altogether unexpected change of pace from the evil flamboyance of his phenomenal Perfume and he Kafkaesque paranoia of The Pigeon, the brilliant German writer Patrick Suskind joins forces with Sempe, the illustrator of New Yorker magazine fame, to bring us a haunting and deceptively simple tale of childhood, innocence lost, and memory as seen in flashback through the eyes of a man now middle-aged.

Mr. Summer's story is, in face, the story of the child whose path he crosses only fleetingly but whose life-- otherwise ordinary in every way-- is forever changed by those few moments in time. At the story's conclusion, the enigmatic Mr. Summer, whose first name no one seems to know, who wonders silently through the countryside, and who is heard to utter but one sentence in the entire novel, appears to us as a man both noble and tragic, whose ultimate disappearance remains a mystery-- and a secret-- to all but the little boy he unknowingly touched long ago.

A timeless and universal fable for children and adults alike.

PATRICK SUSKIND was born in Ambach, near Munich, in 1949. He studied medieval and modern history at the University of Munich. His first novel, Perfume, was an internationally acclaimed best seller. Mr. Suskind lives and writes in Munich.