from the book jacket: "Spirited audacity is perhaps the closest approximation to an accurate description of Ursule Molinaro's newest novel. Introducing us to a failed painter, his wife (a simultaneous translator at the United Nations), and her seventeen-year-old daughter by her first marriage, during a few summer days at an island resort, she allows us to observe the real and imagined sexual lives of these three, in their own household and among other people on the island. That the two major actions in the story are death, by lightning, of a lifeguard and the murder of a homeless, tail-less cat, give some indication of its nature. In Sounds of a Drunken Summer Miss Molinaro manages to move her readers while she is amusing them and to demonstrate, once again, that there is no one writing in English quite the way she does."