‘That place has been my whole life. Everything I thought I knew about myself was constructed in those few months I spent within touching distance of the sea. Everything I am is because Alistair loved me.’

Rachel has been in love with Alistair since she was seventeen. Even though she hasn’t seen him for sixteen years and she’s now married to someone else.

Even though she was a teenager when they met.
Even though he is twenty years older than her.

She’s found it impossible to let go of their summer together on a remote, sun-trapped Greek island.…until now.

#TheGirlsOfSummer @WhatKatieBWrote @TransworldBooks #RandomThingsTours @annecater @RandomTTours #blogtour #metoo

When Rachel unexpectedly reconnects with a girl that she knew back then, she is forced to re examine her memories of that golden summer and confront the truth about her relationship with Alistair and about her time working for an enigmatic and wealthy man on the island. And when Alistair returns, the pull of the past could prove impossible to resist…

My Review

What started off as a fun read about a holiday on an idyllic Greek island slowly turned into something more sinister.

Seventeen-year-old Rachel arrives with her best friend Caroline to simply enjoy the sunshine, make friends and get drunk. But when the money starts to run short, they join another group of teenage girls which includes Helena, Keira and Priya, who share a house and work at a beach bar. Rachel is the last to join them and it’s here that she meets the charismatic Alistair, handsome, charming and twenty years older than her.

She is attracted to him to the point of obsession (at 17 I’m afraid I’d have seen him as creepy – hindsight is a wonderful thing though), so when Caroline goes home to return to college and finish her A levels and go to university, Rachel decides to stay. On a number of occasions, the girls, plus Agnes who is a few years older, are asked to attend parties and entertain Alistair’s boss’s wealthy friends – the alarm bells are ringing so loudly you could have heard them from the mainland. But Rachel and her friends are too happy and drunk to see it.

When Alistair says to Rachel, ‘God, you’re so young,’ that for me was the trigger warning. Of course she is. And so are the others.

That was ‘Then’. In the ‘Now’ sixteen years later, she is married to Tom, but she can’t let go of the past. When they holiday on the same Greek Island, she bumps into one of the girls she met back then and everything changes.

Was life really so idyllic on the island? Was Alistair in love with her or is that what she still wants to believe? At 17, Rachel was naive, but 16 years later she must face the reality of their ‘relationship’ whatever the outcome. Some of the revelations are unexpected, earth-shattering and twisted. This is a book about how we perceive things, until we are made to accept the truth. An important book for today.

Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours

About the Author

KATIE BISHOP is a writer and journalist based in Birmingham, UK. She grew up in the Midlands before moving to Oxford to work in publishing in her early twenties. Whilst working as an assistant editor she started writing articles in her spare time, going on to be published in the New York Times, Guardian, Independent and Vogue. Katie started writing The Girls of Summer during the first UK COVID lockdown, after becoming increasingly interested in stories emerging from the #MeToo movement. The novel is inspired by her own experiences of backpacking, and by her interest in how personal narratives can be reshaped and understood in light of cultural and social changes. In 2020, Katie moved back to the Midlands, and now lives in Birmingham with her partner. She is a full-time writer.

Katie says: “My novel explores themes of consent, power, and memory through the story of a woman reliving a memorable summer in her late teens. Through her emerging memories the novel explores abuse and victimhood, and how victims can rewrite narratives of trauma.

I was initially thinking about writing a book that encapsulated some of the nostalgia and excitement of ‘the one that got away’, but at a time when the #MeToo movement was evolving quite rapidly I started to reflect on my own past relationships differently.

Myself (and a lot of women that I spoke to) were starting to understand their formative relationships and sexual experiences in a different light. I started to think about how I could use the idea of ‘the one that got away’ to explore this reckoning, and how it feels to realise that a relationship that profoundly impacted you could be interpreted in a different light.

The Girls of Summer is a book for every woman. One of the things that I have found most interesting about bringing The Girls of Summer into the world has been the conversations that I’ve had along the way. Almost every woman that I talk to about the book has their own story, their own personal reckoning. An experience they are reminded of that, as an adult, they have had to make peace with.

The #MeToo movement bought about solidarity and empowerment, but it also opened up vast wells of trauma, shame and pain. We have all seen women coming together to shoulder this burden, and to help each other through this. I hope that The Girls of Summer reflects both the horror and the hope of this collective experience.”