Excerpt from SUMMER OF LOVE by Kerri Maher:
In this excerpt, Winnie Hartley and her sister Miranda and friend Rachel are at the Magic Mountain Festival, a major outdoor concert given in Marin County, CA, in June of 1967, the Summer of Love. Winnie has just gotten some food to share, and is heading back to her sister:
Once I’d loaded up a plate, I headed back, chewing on a piece of curry-soaked naan, inhaling the smoke billowing from hundreds of pipes and bongs and joints, letting the sound of laughter and talk and guitars and drums from all around fill my ears and vibrate through my body. There was a treat for every one of the senses, and the vibe was so good, so full of generosity and goodwill, I almost cried with overwhelming happiness. One of every three blankets had some kind of sign atop a stake in the ground: “Bring the troupes home” and “Hell No, Nobody Goes,” amid an absolute wildflower field of peace signs, some of which had been made of bright orange paper poppies, since the real ones had died off by the end of May.
And the concert hadn’t even started yet. I still had that to look forward to. It was better than Christmas Eve, better than that moment right before a first kiss, better than that very first puff.
Just when I finally saw Miranda in the distance, reclining on our blanket and smiling like she was also the happiest she’d ever been, I caught a glimpse of Lincoln a few yards away.
I froze and followed him with my eyes.
Lincoln Salyer.
Is it really him?
I hadn’t seen him in six years, not since he was a gangly teenager with enormous hands and bony elbows and floppy chestnut curls constantly getting into his Caribbean blue eyes.
Yes, that had to be him. The hair and hands were the same, though his arms and shoulders had rounded.
Oh god, and yes, those were his teeth. I’d know that smile, those lips and teeth, anywhere. They’d been fused to mine for years, had explored so many hidden parts of my body.
It was as if I was a cowboy meeting an old nemesis in a dusty ghost town, like the one where we had, in fact, started talking on the 8th grade field trip to the Sonoma Mission and Toscano Hotel. He’d been the new kid for about a month, keeping to himself with books of poetry under shady trees at lunch. He rarely talked in class. But as we ambled along with the twenty other zitty thirteen-year-olds at the old west saloon of the Toscano, he had leaned over and whispered so close I could feel his breath tickle my ear all the way down behind my knees, “Can’t you just see John Wayne walking in here and holding the place up?”
“Gary Cooper,” I’d whispered back, because High Noon was the only western I’d ever seen, and only because it had Grace Kelly in it.
“Fair enough,” he’d whispered back. Then he straightened back up with his arms folded across his chest, nodding and scrutinizing the place anew, as if he was seeing Cooper and Kelly entering stage right. I’d impressed him! I’d said something about a film that had impressed the wild-haired, gorgeous son of the famous and famously private actress who’d mysteriously moved to Napa, 400 miles away from Hollywood.
I never wanted him to stop whispering in my ear after that.
He did a lot of whispering in my ear, among other things I felt behind my knees that were not meant for my knees, for three years until his mother moved him back to southern California, to Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon, Griffith Park and Venice Beach—places he wrote to me about for months, helping me see them through his eyes like I’d helped him see two movies stars from a 1952 western at the Toscano Hotel. Until, abruptly, his letters had stopped—even in response to the ten I over-wrote to him, asking, then begging, to know why he’d gone silent.
I convulsed with memory where I stood.
He wasn’t looking at me.
He was smiling down on some skinny blond in a bikini top and cut-off jeans, no hat, her face turned up to the sun.
Someone—a guy—handed Lincoln a guitar, which he took before sitting on their party’s patchwork quilt, then kissing the blonde long and hard like he meant it.
She put her hand on his thigh as he started to strum the guitar.
Which was when I realized I was dripping daal on my own damn feet.
Of course he’s here, I thought as I used a tissue from my pocket to wipe the food off my toes and sandals. Maybe he was even in one of the bands who’d be taking the stage later.
Suddenly the crowd looked shiny with sweat and already sunburned, and the scent of burning coconut oil mingled grossly with body odor, the tang of sex and other unwashed labors. The din of people’s voices and amateur melodies hurt my ears.
When I stood up after getting about half the daal off my feet, I found myself eye-to-chin with Lincoln.
From SUMMER OF LOVE by Kerri Maher. Copyright © 2026 by the author.
SUMMER OF LOVE by Kerri Maher
In this moving novel about the transformative power of storytelling, three women make life-changing decisions set in motion by the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, from the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller.
It’s the summer of 1967 and the counterculture revolution is in full swing in San Francisco. Every street is alive with the music of Jim Morrison and Dionne Warwick, and in view of the Golden Gate bridge young people come together, waving anti-war signs and shouting for equal rights. No one is more into the messages of love and peace than Winnie Hartley who has just graduated from UC Berkeley determined to use poetry to capture the ever-shifting world around her. When she reconnects with her high school boyfriend, an aspiring musician, their creative bond further fuels her work, and it feels like her life is finally taking off.
Meanwhile, miles up the winding coast, her sister Miranda stays close to home, throwing herself into running the family business, Hartley Vineyard. She’s determined to make California wine that rivals French. But change is in the air this wild and heady summer, and each sister will make choices that set their lives hurdling down paths neither would have imagined.
Fifty years later, Dawn Hartley stays as far as possible from her family’s famous vineyard, until a work assignment requires her to research the bestselling Vineland novels penned by a famously anonymous author. Determined to discover the identity of this mysterious writer—who seems to know things no one should about her family—Dawn embarks on a soul-searching journey along the windswept coast of California to uncover her family’s secrets even as she’s keeping a big one of her own.
Women’s Fiction Friendship [ Berkley, On Sale: July 7, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780593816394 / eISBN: 9780593816400 ]
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About Kerri Maher
Kerri Maher is also the author of This Is Not A Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World under the name Kerri Majors. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded YARN, an award-winning literary journal of short-form YA writing. For many years a professor of writing, she now writes full time and lives with her daughter in Massachusetts where apple picking and long walks in the woods are especially fine.
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