3.5
Summer
ByPublisher Description
The fourth novel in the Seasonal Quartet by Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith is “a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke, and seizing the moment” (The New York Times).
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?
Summer.
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?
Summer.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSummer Reviews
3.5
“Summer
The intervals between my reading of each of the books of Ali Smith’s quartet were too widely spaced for me to make meaningful connections between them. However, that has hardly affected my enjoyment of this concluding instalment.
I have not always been a fan of Smith’s signature like-it-or-hate-it dialogue with no clear demarcation of who said what - however, in this novel, I felt that it made for the seamless and lively prose, and was revealing of the characters and their relationships.
In the novel’s present-day, which was contemporaneous with (just before the start of) the Covid outbreak, a pair of siblings Sacha and Robert Greenlaw, together with their mother Grace, find themselves drawn into an impromptu road trip with strangers they have just met, Arthur and Charlotte, who were characters from “Winter”.
They are off to see Daniel Gluck, from “Autumn”, a 104-year-old survivor of WWII, who drifts in and out of the present as he revisits his past as an incarcerated young German on the Isle of Man in the 1940s.
While seemingly unrelated at first glance, Smith has a way of stitching all these storylines together and engaging the reader as she turns her attention on each focaliser, exploring the themes of family, connection and isolation, the impact of Brexit, as well as the climate crisis.
There is a certain cadence in Ali Smith’s writing that draws you in, though I acknowledge it is not for everyone. Having said that, this is a rather satisfying novel to conclude the quartet and I feel compelled to revisit the other three books to see if there were other nuggets I missed.”
About Ali Smith
ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.
Other books by Ali Smith
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