Summer Fun — Jeanne Thornton

Shortlisted for the 2022 Lammy Award for Transgender Fiction
An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of the Year
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

“I anticipated the release of Summer Fun for six years, and now that I finally got to read it, its characters and story will linger with me much longer than that. I suspect it will come to be considered the Pet Sounds of trans literature: a masterpiece that feels both astonishingly new and comfortingly familiar.”
—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

“In Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, that slow-burn superstar, has dropped a punk’s pop masterpiece—a compulsively readable novel that somehow also reinvigorates the form of the epistolary novel, dives into the deepest reflective waters of fandom, observes trans-cis relations with social-realist precision and generosity, and recovers the trans throughline that was always there. We are so lucky to live now, when we get to read this book.”
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

From acclaimed author Jeanne Thornton, an epic, singular look at fandom, creativity, longing, and trans identity.

Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B—-. Gala needs to know: Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun?

And so she writes letters to B—- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B—- and Gala form a dialogue about creation—of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture.

Summer Fun is a brilliant and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.