A Summer to Die was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977, Lowry’s first novel. It draws directly from her experience of losing her older sister Helen to cancer, and its treatment of sibling dynamics, illness, and death established the emotional precision that would characterize her entire career.
Meg and Molly are sisters who share a room in the country house their family has rented for their father’s sabbatical — and they could not be more different. Molly is beautiful, popular, and confident; Meg is plain, bookish, and resentful. Their conflict is ordinary (the divided room, the competing claims for space and attention), and Lowry renders it without taking sides — Meg’s resentment is real, but so is Molly’s carelessness, and neither sister is villain or saint.
Then Molly begins to have nosebleeds. Then she loses weight. Then she goes to the hospital and doesn’t come back. The illness is never named (a deliberate choice — Meg doesn’t fully understand what is happening, and the reader shares her partial knowledge), but its progress is rendered through accumulating details: the conversations that stop when Meg enters, the visits that become less frequent, the parents’ faces.
The novel does not sentimentalize death or grief: Meg’s feelings are messy — she is sad, but she is also relieved (no more shared room), and then guilty about the relief, and then angry about the guilt. Lowry refuses to simplify any of it.
Collecting A Summer to Die
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed first edition: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$25