A mother watches from the afterlife as her teenage daughter recovers amidst the startling dysfunction of her extended family. Black Dog Summer begins with a farmstead massacre in the South African bush. 38-year-old Sally is but one of the victims. Her life brutally cut short, she narrates from her vantage point in the afterlife and watches as her sister, Adele, her brother-in-law and unrequited love Liam, her niece Bryony, and her teenage daughter, Gigi, begin to make sense of the tragedy.