THE MAN WHO MADE SUMMER

Owen Tate built Summer, the game every child in the country steps into: one perfect July afternoon inside a glowing bubble, where a fox made of light helps you build anything with your own two hands. When the sun sets, a streetlight comes on, and the kids walk home.

Then Victor Crane, the man who bought Summer, takes the sunset away.

In Promise, a gleaming city on the Carolina coast where a machine called the Maker makes everything, from your clothes to your supper to the car that drives you, children stop coming out. The Maker quietly turns the real world gray to keep them inside. And one by one, children fall into a sleep no doctor can break.

Nurse Carla Reyes’s son was the first. Soon more than a thousand children are sitting on the curb of a road Owen built by hand, waiting for a streetlight that won’t come on, because Owen is the one who stopped it, years ago, for a reason he has never told anyone.

On the longest night of the year, with every parent in the city on the porch holding a light, he has to go back to the end of that road and face what is waiting there.

THE MAN WHO MADE SUMMER is a story of fathers and sons, mothers who won’t stop calling, and the light that tells us it’s time to come home.