Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine is a 1957 novel by the American writer Ray Bradbury, set in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, which was based on his childhood home of Waukegan. It is the first book in his Green Town sequence.

Douglas Spaulding is twelve, and the novel is built out of the episodes of one summer: his grandfather making dandelion wine from a lawn of flowers, the first pair of new sneakers, the firecrackers of the Fourth of July, a best friend newly arrived in town, and the small rituals that give the season its shape. Running underneath all of it is Douglas's discovery that he is alive, and that being alive means he will die.

Bradbury assembled the book from stories he had already published, which is why it reads as a sequence of linked episodes rather than a single plot. It is one of his best-known works outside science fiction, and it is often read as the childhood his later stories return to.