An Afternoon in Summer: My Year on a South Sea Island, Doing Nothing, Gaining Everything, and Finally Falling in Love

When American university lecturer Kathy Giuffre decides to take her two young sons and flee to a remote South Pacific island for a year to escape her stressed-out life as a working single mother, she is taking the biggest gamble of her life. She arranges a house in advance, but when she arrives both the house and the person arranging it have vanished into thin air. And she has her boys, aged three and seven, to look after. Things do not look promising. Giuffre describes how what starts out as a disaster turns into a life-changing experience. Finding a home in a ramshackle house on the edge of the ocean with an 82-year-old Maori woman, she and her sons gradually become immersed in island life and rediscover age-old values of friendship and belonging. And there is a twist as Giuffre contacts an old flame from university days and finds to her surprise that he, too, is again single ...

About Kathy Giuffre