Barefoot at the Lake

A Boyhood SUmmer in Cottage Country

"Bruce Fogle's sweet, beautifully-written memoir, Barefoot at the Lake, precisely catches the fleeting magic of both adolescence and Canadian summer. Reading it is like peering into a snapshot, taken long ago at a beloved cottage." —David Macfarlane, author of Summer Gone

An idyllic summer at the cottage in the 1950s, as revealed through the eyes of a boy on the cusp of adolescence: a first crush, the joy of nature, and the struggle to understand grown-ups.

To ten-year-old Bruce, the summer of 1954 seemed, at first, like any other in cottage country: floating in the rowboat, eating peach pie, watching the seagulls, frogs, and herons, and catching crayfish. But just when he thinks that life is perfect, everything starts to change, and over the summer both the harshness of the adult world and the patterns of the natural world reveal themselves. By the time the weather turns he will be a different child and will have chosen his own path to understanding the wilderness that waits behind the family cottage.