The Last Good Summer

A Coming-of-Age Tragedy About Creative Ownership

If you’ve ever mistaken shared creation for shared ownership, this story will feel uncomfortably familiar.

Set against the long summers of the late 1990s, The Last Good Summer follows a group of boys growing up on the edge of freedom—filming stunts, pushing limits, and building a shared dream that feels unbreakable. At the center is a partnership built on trust: one boy behind the camera, one in front of it.

As the years pass, that balance shifts—not through a single betrayal, but through small decisions, unspoken assumptions, and the quiet reassignment of credit. Admiration becomes asymmetrical. Risk is shared unevenly. What once felt like collaboration begins to tilt, and the work they made together starts to belong more to one than the other.

Told by a man looking back decades later, the novel traces how loyalty hardens into silence, how identity forms under pressure, and how the cost of staying can exceed the cost of leaving.

Grounded in psychological realism and moral complexity, The Last Good Summer is a story about brotherhood, betrayal, and the lasting consequences of choices made before anyone understands what they’re worth—or what they will eventually take.