Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2020
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"A deeply resonant finale to a work that should come to be recognized as a classic...wonderfully entertaining—for its humor, allusions, deft use of time and memory, sharply realized characters, and delightfully relevant digressions—and a reminder, brought home by the pandemic, that everything and everyone truly is connected and the sufferance of suffering hurts us all." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ali Smith concludes her seasonal quartet with the triumphant Summer, the long-awaited final installment in a groundbreaking postmodern series...Smith reach[es] resonant conclusions on themes carried through...Now is the time to read straight through all four installments, which hang together in one grand, epic aria. Smith's visionary series, ambitious in its scale and towering in its achievements, will be studied and imitated for decades to come." - Esquire
"This novel is a remarkable and clear-sighted resolution of Smith's project, which has felt all along as if it wants to nudge us towards hope, towards the idea that if we want to reverse the irreversible flow of history, we have to look to what the novel can do." - The Guardian
This information about Summer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Sarah Wood
Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Winter, Autumn, Public Library and other Stories, and How to be Both, which won the Baileys Prize for Women's 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.
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