The Summer Boy Is Good, It’s Just Not Lie With Me.

Quick Take

The Summer Boy has everything Philippe Besson does well: clean, restrained prose, precise observation of male desire, and a retrospective narrator who knows he never fully understood what he lived through. What it lacks is the emotional universality that made Lie with Me so hard to put down. The loss at the center of this book is real, but it stays at a distance, and the novel ends before it quite resolves. Readers who love Besson will find plenty to admire here. Those new to him should start elsewhere.

About the Author

Philippe Besson is one of France’s most celebrated literary novelists, a prizewinning author and screenwriter whose debut, In the Absence of Men, won the Emmanuel-Roblès Prize in 2001. His body of work returns again and again to the same territory: gay desire rendered with extraordinary restraint, memory as wound, the weight of what young men leave unsaid. Lie with Me, his breakthrough novel for English-language readers, became a number-one French bestseller and found a global readership when it was translated in 2019, partly on the strength of Molly Ringwald’s translation, but mostly because it captured something readers recognized in their bones: the specific ache of a love that had to stay hidden.

The Summer Boy is narrated by a version of Besson himself at eighteen, looking back from an adult life that has never shaken a particular summer. Sam Taylor, one of the most respected literary translators working today, handles the English text. His credits include Laurent Binet, Leïla Slimani, and David Diop, and his translations have been recognized by the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award, and the Scott-Moncrieff Prize among others. The prose here is light on its feet and unsentimental in the way Besson requires.

What Is The Summer Boy About?

In the summer of 1985, eighteen-year-old Philippe arrives at a scruffy resort island off the coast of France for what should be another golden, uneventful season. He shares the house with François, the son of his parents’ friends, a boy he has grown up alongside. The group expands to include Marc, a Parisian visitor Philippe finds himself circling with unspoken interest, Alice, Marc’s sister, who wants Philippe, and Nicolas, a recent arrival to the island whose mother fled a violent father on the mainland. Nicolas is quiet and slightly apart from the group. Philippe is drawn to him without quite knowing why.

The summer unspools in the way Besson summers do: slowly, sun-drenched, dense with desire and subtext. Then one night, after a late evening out, Nicolas disappears. The rest of the novel is Philippe’s attempt to sit with what that disappearance meant and what he failed to do that night. He is looking back from decades later, still carrying it.

The Prose Knows Exactly What It Is Doing

Besson’s style in translation has a particular quality that is easy to underestimate: it appears simple but is doing a lot of work quietly. Sentences are short and declarative. Emotions are named rather than performed. The effect is not coldness but a kind of precision that lands harder than lush description would. Sam Taylor’s translation preserves this register faithfully, keeping the language sparse and undefended in the way the original demands.

This is Besson’s greatest strength as a writer, and The Summer Boy has it in full. The observation of how teenage boys exist around each other, the way desire circulates through a group without ever quite being named, the particular way class moves through a French summer gathering (Philippe and François are comfortable; Nicolas is not; the Parisians are something else entirely) — all of it is rendered with the attentiveness Besson has made his signature. The book knows what it is doing, sentence by sentence. That is not nothing.

Where Lie with Me Had a Hook, This One Reaches for It

The difference between this novel and Lie with Me is not one of craft. It is one of emotional logic.

Lie with Me worked because its central experience, a love that had to stay hidden, a relationship that could not be claimed, the specific loneliness of a queer adolescence that had no language for itself, is one that a very large number of readers carry some version of personally. The novel did not need to work hard to create resonance. The resonance was already there, waiting. Readers brought half of it with them.

The Summer Boy is built around a different kind of loss: the sudden disappearance of a friend, the guilt of having been nearby when something happened, the way one night can divide a life into before and after. This is a real and serious subject, and Besson handles it with care. But it is a loss that stays specific to Philippe. The novel does not quite find the angle that makes it feel universal in the same way. Nicolas remains slightly opaque throughout, which may be the point, but it means the loss of him lands more as a formal object than an emotional one. You feel the shape of the wound more than the wound itself.

The ending makes a choice that will divide readers. Besson does not resolve the mystery of what happened to Nicolas, not fully. There is something honest about that, and something intentional: grief does not resolve, and not knowing is part of the experience. But as a novel, this approach leaves the reader holding something unfinished. That is the intent, most likely. It is also, for some readers, a reason the book may not stay with them the way Lie with Me did.

Is The Summer Boy Worth Reading?

For readers who already love Philippe Besson and want more of his prose, his instincts, his particular way of rendering desire and memory at the same time: yes. This book delivers everything he is good at. The gap between it and Lie with Me is real but not damning.

For readers coming to Besson for the first time, Lie with Me is still the entry point. Read that one first. If it does what it usually does, you will find your way here soon enough.

The honest caveat is this: if you are reading for emotional catharsis, for the feeling of a story that earns and then releases its grief, The Summer Boy may leave you wanting. The discomfort of an unresolved ending is partly the novel’s argument. Whether that argument lands will depend entirely on what you bring to it.

Final Verdict

The Summer Boy is Philippe Besson working at a high level, with Sam Taylor’s translation keeping the language exactly where it needs to be. The prose is assured, the observation of adolescent male desire is sharp, and the structure is disciplined. What it does not have is the emotional universality that made Lie with Me a book people pressed into each other’s hands. The loss here is particular rather than shared, and the ending’s deliberate irresolution is honest but not quite satisfying. A worthwhile read for Besson devotees; not the place to begin.

For more queer literary fiction, see our Essential Queer Books List.