In his forties and still a bachelor, Theodore Colville is at loose ends after selling his Indiana newspaper. He decides to go back to Florence, Italy, where two decades ago a love affair of his ended badly. Soon after returning, he runs into an old friend, Evalina Bowen, who knew the girl who jilted him and who is now a chaperone for Imogene Graham, a girl of about twenty. Imogene is exciting and fresh and very earnest, and soon Colville and she are seeing more of each other. But it’s unclear if they can overcome the difference in their ages and experience, what their relationship amounts to, and what they really mean to each other.

William Dean Howells wrote Indian Summer when he was in his forties himself, after a trip to Italy he took with his family. Because of its warmth and its generous ending, it remains one of his more well-loved novels. As John Updike put it, “A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy and more gracious acceptance of life’s irrevocability.”