Blue Summer is winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Awards Fiction Prize!

"...the main character is tremendously appealing...we loved the way Jim Nichols wrote about music, and about creating music..." Judges, Maine Literary Awards

"Blue Summer offers no simple path to redemption, no easy walk to healing, but chronicles instead the flawed and broken gestures that we all make to honor the memory of the ones who continue to haunt us. With prose that can be both restrained and luminous, careful and lyrical, Nichols has composed here a story that is full of difficult truth and complex - and very often beautiful - Music." Jaed Coffin, author of Roughouse Friday

"In Cal Shaw, Nichols gives the reader a man humbled by experience who now looks back, accompanied by a melody — a melody that brought him back from the brink and is the same melody that will forever be his companion, bringing him memories of his youth, loss and love. It's an exceptional beginning and an exceptional book. Using a first-person perspective, Nichols lets Shaw tell us his story and provides us with not only a narrator but also a friend, a childhood buddy and a taxi-driving, recovering-alcoholic, cornet playing jazz musician to engage with in the process. Cal Shaw is all of that and much more, and Nichols expertly builds upon that throughout the story, adding layers to this man, some predictable and some very surprising." Rick Heller, The Quoddy Times

"Blue Summer is an effortless read, but that doesn't mean it is without deeper meaning, symbolism and moments of delicate thoughts." James M. Fisher, the Miramichi Reader

'The novel itself is crafted much like a blues piece – loose, tantalizing, taking readers in new directions, always turning back on itself. The author's process of getting the story down is much like Cal's working to capture a teasing and elusive musical mood. Nichols lets the story build slowly, as if it is carrying him where it wants to go. There are quarter notes and half notes scattered early that give the reader the thinnest glimpses of the tragedy of Cal's life. It isn't until the end, however, that the full tragedy is revealed. Blue Summer is Nichols's best yet." Frank O. Smith, Portland Sunday Telegram

Biography

Jim Nichols, his wife Anne and Jesse the Flat-coated retriever split their time between Warren, Maine and Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Jim isn't quite sure how that happened, but is happy it did, especially in January through April.) Jim has published work in many venues, including Change Seven, december, Esquire, Zoetrope ASE, Narrative, Night Train, River City, elimae, The Clackamas Review, American Fiction Vol.9, Germ and Portland Monthly. He is the 2014 winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction (december magazine), a past winner of the Willamette Fiction Prize, a recipient of a Maine Arts Commission Independent Artists Fellowship and a prize winner in the River City Writing Awards. His collection Slow Monkeys and Other Stories was published in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon Press and his novel Hull Creek (Downeast Books) appeared in April, 2011. A novel-in-stories called Closer All The Time was published in 2015 by Islandport Press and won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Fiction. His new novel Blue Summer (Islandport Press) was published in September, 2020, and won the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Fiction, making Jim the only two-time recipient of this award so far. (Past winners include Lily King, Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Christine Baker Kline, Roxana Robinson and Bill Roorbach though, so chances are this distinction will be short-lived).

Anne and her flock

Young eagle across the river...

Older bird with friend....