Dying In the Twilight of Summer

About the Book

Dying in the Twilight of Summer tells a story about the fictional town of Great Pines. It is a story about lost innocence and the challenges of life in a small town. Great Pines could easily be any number of the small towns that continue to vanish in what remains of the once rugged American West. The story is told through the eyes of four young men growing up in a town that is losing its culture.  The boys are unable to stop the hands of time that only seem to bring more hardships and crush their youthful dreams.

Dying in the Twilight of Summer offers something to readers of all ages. The themes of friendship and ambition are entirely American, and the difficulties in coming of age and defining of one’s self are timeless reflections that every free spirit has faced and typically never solved. Author Seth O’Connell gives readers a glimpse into the obscure and uncomfortable time between youthful idealism and adult realism. O’Connell’s writing exposes emotional self-conflicts with straight-forward, poignant prose. The story may not change your life, but it may change the way you think.  

About the Author

         Seth O’Connell was born with a wild imagination. A left-handed, middle-child, Seth was the definition of right-brained from the start.  He was born and raised in rural Marysville, Montana. Once a great mining center, Marysville had a population of less than fifty in the mid 1980’s while Seth was growing up there. The lack of children his own age meant that, aside from his two brothers, Seth’s greatest friends were his own imagination and the great open wilderness of the Rocky Mountains.

           At age 10, the O’Connell family moved to nearby Helena, where Seth fell in love with baseball and adventure. It was his passion for these two things that would eventually lead him to California’s Bay Area. Although Seth had kept journals off and on since high school, it wasn’t until college that Seth discovered his third love: writing. In six years, the nomadic youth attended four college, soaking up as much of the fast, bustling West Coast culture as possible.  

It was in California, between rock concerts, bar-tending, and classes that Seth wrote Dying in the Twilight of Summer. It began as another short story but would not end. The ideas consumed him and he found inspiration everywhere and traits for his characters in everyone he met. Like the characters in his novel, Seth became obsessed with defining self and what it meant to be American.

In the spring of 2008, Seth graduated from San Francisco State University.  He currently resides in Montana where he lives with his father and is working on his second novel.