Deeply in love, a couple decide to leave everyday life behind them and retreat to an island far from civilisation. Just the two of them, just as they are. Merely living together will be enough for them – they want to focus on loving and being. They arrive, settle into their new home and let themselves drift in the summertime island idyll.
Soon, however, they begin to notice strange things: the grim looks of their neighbour, an old woman who stares at them from her rocking chair; an olive tree uprooted by invisible forces that falls in front of their rented car; a whispering that blows through olive groves at the new moon. Are these just the fantasies of the two protagonists? What is real here? And what is this reality stretching toward, layer by layer? In an environment of increasingly sinister events, the sphere of the lovers’ seclusion gradually threatens to engulf them between light and shadow – and as it does, many questions are forced on them.
As in his novella The Lovers by the Dunes, Lu Bonauer writes here about love – in Summerland, about the undertow of a deeply felt love. But also about how in the wake of this wonderful force, lovers can risk losing their individual selves as they merge with one another in an intense relationship.