The Summer Guest

The Summer Guest is a novel by the American writer Justin Cronin, published in 2004 by the Dial Press. Cronin had won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his earlier book Mary and O'Neil, and he later wrote The Passage trilogy.

Harry Wainwright is a wealthy man who has spent thirty summers at the same fishing camp in Maine, and he returns for one final visit with a request and with a will that names the people who have looked after him. The novel is set over that visit and then goes back through the history of the place and the people in it: a guide whose life was shaped by the Vietnam era, a family that has run the camp for generations, and the battles of love and marriage that connect them. Cronin writes about the relationships between people rather than about the fishing, and the bequest is the device that makes everyone examine what they owe each other. The book is a quiet, domestic novel set in a small community in the north-east of the United States.

Cronin's later work moved into much longer speculative fiction, and this earlier novel is the one that established his interest in families and the ordinary arrangements that hold them together.