I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer is an epistolary novel telling the story of a young Black student navigating campus politics, community tensions, and his own guilt over his past life as a drug runner. He finds space for atonement working at a beauty salon, but as scandal erupts fate takes a haunting, complex turn that encompasses radical politics, sexism, and racism. Contrasting campus satire with an ode to the working-class culture of a Black beauty shop, I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer presents a complex parable on the question of grace, who needs it, who is scared of it, who runs from it, and who struggles to accept it. Drawing from Native Son, The Stranger, and The Sorrows Of Young Werther, I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer is a protest novel that breaks every rule of protest novels and is a ferocious, irreverent, yet compassionate read.
"A select few writers can take you on a journey where there is no air in the atmosphere; however, those writers make you forget you need to breathe through passages written in a profoundly emotional essence where the writer's metaphors rise like roots to keep the reader on life supporting drugs. Robert Lashley pens a bottomless soul. Once you open this book, Robert grabs your attention and chains greatness between each line, each chapter in an unfettered rawness that allows us to see beyond our imagination. [...] We are observers as he takes us to a literary stratosphere with fierce and sincere pain but ironic- hilarious obscene, and tender times." ? Alvin L.A. Horn, NAACP Image Award Nominee, Essence Magazine and USA-TODAY best-selling author
About the Author:
Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017), and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney's, and The Cascadia Review, among others. In 2019, Entropy Magazine named The Homeboy Songs one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle. I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer is his first novel.
