Краят на лятото

by Danielle Steel, Даниел Стийл, Красимира Христова (Translator)

Deanna was eighteen when she married a handsome Frenchman, attorney Marc-Edouard Duras. Now, at thirty-seven, she should be happy with Marc, her elegant home in San Francisco, and their teenage daughter, Pilar. But one summer changes it all when she realizes her failing marriage is a trap she must escape.

Genres: Romance, Fiction, Chick Lit, Contemporary Romance, Contemporary, Drama, Novels

313 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Danielle Steel has been hailed as one of the world's bestselling authors, with almost a billion copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include All That Glitters, Royal, Daddy's Girls, The Wedding Dress, The Numbers Game, Moral Compass, Spy, and other highly acclaimed novels. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina's life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; Expect a Miracle, a book of her favorite quotations for inspiration and comfort; Pure Joy, about the dogs she and her family have loved; and the children's books Pretty Minnie in Paris and Pretty Minnie in Hollywood.

Facebook.com/DanielleSteelOfficial
Instagram: @officialdaniellesteel

Reviews

[Suz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a quick read for me on a road trip. Traffic was terrible so I had lots of time. Alas, as always, we find some very well to do adults, a marriage that has stayed together, and a husband that's not nice. Then of course a wife that finds the love of her life, they come together for a passionate while, then end up apart. They should be together and she makes the selfless decision to stay apart. But will that be the end?! A bit of fun, I wasn't disappointed I read it, as it was an easy read which was light and didn't require any effort. Pilar was a cute name I liked, I like coming across quirky names. This DS is one I'm sure die hard fans will love.

[Aimee Morales Clear · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this book for the 3rd time and I want to start it over again. I LOVE this book! This book makes me want to take my sketch paper and charcoal pencils on a road trip to Carmel and bask away in the sun and leisure time. This is probably my favorite Danielle Steel book and she really did well with the raw feelings and setting description. You really and truly feel for these characters! You'll not want to put the book down!

[lacy white · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yet another DS book that I have to rate three stars. When will it end? The reason that I didn't like this book to well was for one simple reason. It's such a typical plot. Deanna is trapped in a pretty awful marriage. She can't leave for some reason, I have no idea why. Her daughter treats her like crap and is a total daddy's girl.

Then Deanna meets Ben and they fall in love. But after the summer is over, she realizes that she can't be with him so she goes back to her terrible husband. Finds out her husband has been cheating on her for god knows how long.

So she leaves the husband finally and lives on her own. But the worst part of this book is? she doesn't take Ben back, right away, even though he said he'll take her back. . Like what the hell?

This book just really flopped for me. I hated the ending. I thought Deanna was just too wishy washy. Not to mention she made incredibly dumb decisions. It was just like seriously lady? Why stay with a guy that has been cheating on you for forever? Go with the dude that obviously loves you. It was like she was a teenager not a grown ass adult.

I really wouldn't recommend this book. It's a quick and easy read so if you're okay with that, then maybe this book is for you. But I won't be reading it again.

[Magdalena · Rating 2 out of 5]

When banality becomes amusing.
Some good theories about why French people are so stupid and mean. Another thrilling production by the Steel factory. Another beautiful and suffering heroine, another handsome man. Both wealthy but modest, beautiful but not superficial, smart and sensible. And of course BIG LOVE. Enjoy, it's like a supermarket cupcake - a decent industrial comfort food.

[Alex (Alex's Version) · Rating 2 out of 5]

eh.

[Kandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one of steele's best books!

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book on my flight from North Carolina to San Jose. It was a very easy read as I finished when I landed at my layover in Las Vegas. More of a love story and drama.

[krwczk · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.75
Nie powala pod względem literackim, bohaterzy są niezwykle irytujący, a cała fabuła nieudolnie próbuje być dramatyczna i wciągająca(podkreślam słowo nieudolnie). Dwie gwiazdki daję za fragmenty o sztuce, gdyż były w miarę ciekawe i za jeden lekki zwrot akcji.

[Crystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not usually a fan of books with pathetic female leads (which I found this one to be), but there was enough character development that I was able to understand how she might have ended up that way.

There was a bit of obsession with youth in this book. Every second positive descriptive word was "young" ("...she looked so radiant and young...", etc)and ever second negative descriptive word was "old" (...she looked tired and aged..., etc). It seemed over all the message this book was attempting to make was that you're never to old to go after what makes you happy. But in the end it really came across as - you're never to old to do what makes you happy as long as you look young.

There is one thing I could definitely not understand in this book which was (SPOILER ALERT!) the unbelievably short mourning period for her daughter! I can't believe anyone saying something like : "I've never been so happy in my whole life.", only days after the death of her daughter, regardless of the circumstances. This, more than anything else, ruined the book for me.

I would say the most redeeming thing about this book is that (SPOILER ALERT!)in the end she leaves her controlling, emotionally abusive, cheating husband. Kudos to that in a romance book written in the 70's.

[Layla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a *very* depressing read for about 90% of the book. I alternated between wanting to cry for the heroine, slap some sense into her, and kick the cheating, irresponsible jackass of a husband in the nuts.

The ending somewhat redeemed it though: the soon-to-be ex husband gets a taste of his own medicine when he finds out that his mistress of many years has been cheating with his business partner. The h, who had only been staying with her husband bc she thought it was his child, found out it was the H's so she *finally* leaves the husband and gets her HEA.

[Mudpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this when I was 14, that's more than 20 years ago but this book remains vividly in my mind. To me it was such a beautiful love story and Deanna had had so much heartaches in her 37 years!

Now upon rereading as an adult approaching middle age, it does not sit well with me that Deanna was an adulteress. Marc was a bastard; it didn't matter he cheated first and kept on lying and lying...but two wrongs don't make a right.

My slightly younger self would have been very self righteous and condemn Ben and Deanna's behaviour. But now that I'm older I have to accept that in life very few things are clearly black and white.

Clearly Ben and Deanna were soul mates. Their attraction to each other was powerful and almost instantaneous. Both tried to fight it but failed. What they had that summer was beautiful! Ben was everything Marc was not: loving, supportive and respectful of Deanna as a woman and artist. With Ben's love Deanna finally grew into her own independent woman. Marc was fathering Deanna after rescuing her at 19?! And his mistress...was indeed young enough to be his daughter...



SPOILERS


I respect Deanna when she chose to go it alone; there was not much honour in going from one man to another when she had left Ben at summer's end. She needed to know she could survive on her own, at 37.

Though I felt sad Ben lost those months not being able to experience the pregnancy with Deanna.

And Marc got his just desserts...his mistress cheating on him with his business partner!

[Notserp2002 · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a re-read of my favorite author. originally read it back in the 80's. did not remember it at all! lol i had all different emotions reading it...happy, hate, sadness. absolutely loved the ending!

[Danica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first shot at a Danielle Steele novel. It's definitely one long, complicated yet satisfying love story.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danielle Steel You cant go wrong with any of her books! DS is my favorite I always know its going to be good!

[Curlyhair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this, when I read it, but not one of my favourite by the author.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt that the novel was slow to start and if fact took about 250 pages to get into the story. It had a good ending but didn’t enjoy it like other Danielle Steel novels.

[Cindy]

Ott,soap opera -ish .The characters were not terribly likeable,IMO.In all fairness, I must admit I did skim and speedread!😂
Chose to read because of H 5 year infidelity

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another good book from Danielle Steel. I have her books for years and usually love them all. However, this one started a little too slowly and I almost stopped reading. I’m glad I kept reading because because it did get better. Not one of my favorites from her though.

[Yvonne · Rating 2 out of 5]

No thanks!

[Regina Larkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was written in that dim corridor of days between the 22nd and 28th of October, 2025—a week blurred by the hiss of oxygen and the slow drip of IV lines at Bellona Nursing Home & Diagnostic Centre Pvt. Ltd. I was then a reluctant guest of illness, recovering from an infection that had seized both lungs and kidneys. Forgive, therefore, the infrequent tremor in my language; it bears the soft delirium of painkillers and the fragile clarity of a mind half-dreaming between fever and thought.

Summer’s End is one of those Danielle Steel novels that pretends to be about love but is, in fact, about the ghost-life of time—that strange residue left behind when desire ends but the calendar does not. It tells the story of Deanna, who is young enough to hope and old enough to know better, bound in a marriage that feels like a house built on sand.

There is a kind of aching stillness to her life, a summer that never fully arrives. Reading it now, from the antiseptic white glare of the hospital, I couldn’t help but feel how Steel’s language, for all its simplicity, is built around a Kristevan melancholy, where every sentence carries the undertone of something unspoken, something that leaks through the syntax like oxygen through plastic tubing.

Steel has a way of making pain ordinary—domesticated even—and that’s what fascinates me. There are no grand philosophies in her prose, but there’s an unconscious philosophy humming underneath: that every romance is a text written against time’s entropy.

Deanna’s affair with Ben, the artist, becomes not just a rebellion against her husband, Marc, but against narrative linearity itself. It’s as if she refuses to remain within the plot designed for her. “She was living again,” Steel writes—and I, reading it, tethered to IVs, felt that same flicker: the faint re-entry of the self into life’s syntax after drifting in ellipses.

Barthes, if he were alive to annotate Steel, might have called this the grain of sentimentality—the way cliché becomes sacred when experienced sincerely. The book is soaked in clichés, yes: the lonely wife, the passionate lover, the tragic ending. But like the repetitions of prayer, their power is in their recurrence. I remember thinking that Steel’s clichés operate as Derridean supplements: they fill the voids left by what cannot be said. Deanna’s words to Ben are less dialogue and more invocation, the signifier clinging to its own echo.

And perhaps that’s what made me linger—because the hospital room, too, is a kind of repetition machine. The beeps, the nurse’s footsteps, the morning thermometer—all versions of the same sentence, spoken differently each day. Reading Summer’s End turned into a strange mirror: Deanna trapped in her marriage, me trapped in my convalescence, both waiting for the season to end.

Steel’s novels often get dismissed as middlebrow escapism, but beneath their glossy surfaces lie fractures that theory can’t quite ignore. The way Deanna’s love affair is structured—inevitable, doomed, luminous—follows not Freudian drive but Kristeva’s chora, that pre-symbolic rhythm where meaning isn’t yet fixed. The sea, the sun, the summer—they’re all symbols of fluidity, of the semiotic before language hardens into logos. Deanna’s body becomes a site of translation between the two: the structured world of her husband and the untamed semiotic of her desire.

And yet, for all this passion, Summer’s End is haunted by absence. Ben dies, as lovers must in order for sentiment to achieve mythic density. His death doesn’t simply close the story; it opens a void that reorganises Deanna’s identity. She learns, finally, that love’s permanence isn’t in its duration but in its residue—what remains when it’s gone. Reading that line, I felt something unclench inside me. In illness, one learns this too: the body’s endurance is not its strength but its memory of pain.

The book’s style, for all its simplicity, is built on repetition and echo. Steel uses the same adjectives again and again—beautiful, lonely, strong, fragile—and while most critics see that as laziness, I think it’s closer to a Kristevan stutter. Meaning resists closure, circles around itself, refuses to stabilise. The language performs Deanna’s longing. When she says she’s “afraid to be happy,” the phrase loops back endlessly, until happiness itself becomes terrifying—a form of death.

And here’s the strange confession: as I read, I began to map my IV drips to Steel’s emotional rhythm. The slow rise and fall of saline mirrored her waves of passion and regret. The oxygen hiss became a Barthesian breath of the lover, that fragile sound that both sustains and betrays desire. My room blurred into her beach house. The scent of disinfectant mingled with imaginary sea breeze. I became Deanna—waiting for something irreversible to happen.

Steel’s genius—if we may use that word—is not in her sentences but in her sentiment architecture. She knows exactly when to let hope bloom and when to let it wilt. Summer’s End isn’t a book about love triumphing; it’s about love surviving through loss, and that’s what makes it endure.

When Deanna finally accepts her grief, she does not return to her husband out of duty; she does so out of narrative necessity. The text demands closure, but the reader is left haunted by the open wound of what was. That is where Derrida would smile—the supplement has replaced the original.

There’s a moment near the end—small, almost forgettable—when Deanna stands by the sea and realises she is not the same woman she was before. That’s the kind of line that slips under your skin. I read it twice, thrice. The afternoon light through my hospital window turned golden, the world quiet, and I thought of how every recovery is a kind of return to the self through the detour of suffering. The self, like Deanna, must fall apart before it can name its own desire.

And what of summer itself? It ends, of course—it must. But Steel doesn’t let it die; she suspends it in narrative amber, a perpetual dusk between fulfillment and regret. That’s why her novels, for all their romantic melodrama, remain strangely timeless. They operate not in chronological time but in emotional kairos—the moment out of time when feeling crystallises into myth.

In the final pages, Deanna is alone again, but the tone is not despair. It’s serene, resigned, luminous. She has internalised her loss, as if grief were the only stable language left. Barthes called this the neutral, the space between passion and detachment, where language no longer burns but glows faintly. That’s where the novel ends.

And that’s where I too found myself—half-breathing, half-thinking, no longer desiring to escape my bed, only to observe the slow movement of time around me.

Summer’s End became less a novel and more a mirror—one where I saw my own recovery and my own quiet renunciations reflected back. In its simplicity, it whispered the only truth both lovers and patients eventually learn: that everything beautiful must be brief, and everything brief must be remembered precisely because of that. The summer ends, but its light stays on your skin.

And so, when I closed the book, the drip had slowed, the nurse had gone, and the world felt suspended. I realised Steel had done something I hadn’t expected—she’d turned the machinery of sentiment into a form of revelation.

In her world, love and loss are not opposites but twins. And in mine, lying beneath the dim blue light of Bellona, that truth felt as close to healing as anything medicine could offer.

Give it a go.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is about a woman, called Deanne Duras, who is a talented painter, without knowing it herself, who is married to a rich elderly lawyer, who is often away for business, and keeps a 2nd ménage with a young french girl who accompanies him on his trips. The husband and spoiled brat of a teenage daughter go to France to stay with his mother, a cold-blooded woman, where the daughter is involved in a serious motor accident. During the 3-month vacation, Deanne meets a gallery owner, who convinces her to show her work, and she gets involved with him.
The book reads very smoothly and is fine for complexless and relaxing summer reading, but it's all too predictable and Danielle Steel's eternal stories about beautiful and rich people are at times annoying me very much. Her stories would have more depth if she would have more attenton for the inner sides of her characters than always about the outer elements... I prefer her stories that are based upon historical facts, at least they have some credibility. But on the positive side, there's always enough intrigue in her novels to keep her readers turning the pages till the predictable ending....

[Alona Perlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a die-hard Jackie Collins fan, I was absolutely devastated when she died. I literally felt as if I lost a part of my family. I have been skeptical about Danielle Steel, although I've read some of her books and they were entertaining. I still did not get the same feel as Jackie Collins from the previous books that I read, but decided to them more of a try. This book turned everything around for me. Danielle Steele sets the stage and captures your interest right away. The characters are extremely memorable and the setting is charming and dream-like. There are twists and turns all throughout the book and you don't see many things coming. I was totally swept up in the story and I feel like I know the characters personally. The story is vivid, interesting and entertaining. I got so wrapped up in the book that I don't want it to end and don't want to start another novel because I want "Summer's End" to go on. Thank you for writing this novel and creating a world that one could escape to.

[Hollie]

I like Danielle Steel books but have not read one in a long time, and this one was definitely worth the wait. It is one of those books that once you get into it, you can't read it quickly enough, you just want to get to the next page and see what is going to happen. Within the first few pages it is easy to see what a good book this is, and, which is unusual for these types of books but also quite nice, there is more left to the imagination than is put in print.
The good part that I found was that by about halfway through the book you can see something that is happening that hasn't been told but you just have to wait and see if you are right until almost the end.

[Teneka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hated the fact that this Marc character reminded me so much of my narcissistic ex. Preying on the young and the weak Deanna, taking her in and controlling everything about her life where she can only depend on him. Till she finally realized what life and true love is all about. I felt like the book kind of ended abruptly with her getting what she deserves but I think it should have been drawn out a little bit more like the rest of the book however I have truly enjoyed it! Now off to another Danielle steel book The Ring!

[Connlou Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

(c)1979 Deanna marries young but realizes that after having a daughter there is no love or romance left. A husband that leaves months at a time and a daughter who attends school elsewhere leaves Deanna feeling very alone and lonely. The genre brings about romance, mistrust, friendship and struggling to find oneself.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining book with unexpected plot twists. There were parts, though, that two people would banter back and forth and then bring the topic up again and maybe a third time. These pages were tedious.

I recommend this book.

[Tabbiann]

I read this book from 1-16-09 till 1-19-09.

[Donia Sheikh · Rating 5 out of 5]

رواية أكثر من رائعة. أحداثها صعبة التوقع. تشدّ القارئ لمعرفة ما سيحدث. أنا سعيدة بالنهاية، و"شمتانة" بمارك!

[Bruna · Rating 5 out of 5]

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