This is the second book I read by Ali Smith and I found it brilliant.
It's a great book that talks about current issues and it can be funny, poignant, enraging at the same time.
It's surely engrossing and once you start you cannot put it down.
The style of writing is great and I love it.
It's strongly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This final part in Smith's seasonal quartet does everything a reader could have hoped for it to do. The line that has been slowly drawing each story together comes full circle (just like the seasons - imagine!) and the craft involved in achieving that with such art and warmth and humanity is astonishing. As ever, the politics are stated clearly on the page and while that's likely to be off-putting to some, in this final part of the quartet in particular it only veers occasionally towards didactic and even then does so with such lightness and grace it feels entirely within keeping. I can't think of another writer who would be able to deliver such a considered, sweeping tale that is so clearly years in the making with such up-to-date considerations. Summer is a standout novel to be read and recommended on its own. Within the context of the series it's a triumph – the quartet as a whole is infinitely more than the sum of its (not at all inconsiderable) parts.

I've had the others in this series for months but hadn't read them. When I got this as an advanced copy I brushed off the other three and read one every day for four days. I think this is one of the best series I have ever read and easily my top read of 2020. It's magnificent as a series, and I would recommend you read them in order to experience the complete splendour of this work. Multi-faceted, humane, breathtakingly clever without being impenetrable or lofty. It is beautiful and funny and sad and everything you want in a book, but could so easily be a symphony or a painting or a film. I try to explain the plots of the books to people and I don't do them justice, because it is a bit like the part of the book where someone is explaining how a scientist looked through a slice of a dragon fly's eye and suddenly realised how multi faceted the world is depending on the way you look at it. This book is about so many things, and to pick one is to do it an deep injustice. This book brings Daniel's story to completion in the most beautiful way but also talks about lockdown, the rise of the far right, art, history, science, perspective and love. So much love. It's beautiful.

After a slight decline with Spring Ali Smith is back to her playful, compassionate best with Summer. As with Autumn and the EU referendum the Coronavirus that stalks around the tale is resonant and painful while we fine ourselves still struggling with the pandemic. Many of the themes and characters are familiar from earlier instalments, racism (managing to include the tragic death of George Floyd is remarkable considering that it happened just days before proofs were printed), immigration, intergenerational conflict, art and artists, lies and deception (particularly from governments), Shakespeare and Dickens. Most of all it has her lucid, luminous prose, her masterful wordplay and her ability to create powerful, resonating chapters, in this one "So?" to capture the debilitating power of apathy. In her characters and their relationship she also has a remarkable perception of humanity and it complexities. And one thing I love despite all the darkness and uncertainty Smith finds (and creates) hope through art. The quartet has been a huge success and Summer ends it brilliantly.

If you asked me to describe what Summer was about, I'm not sure I'd be able to - or at least not without writing another novel in response.

Ali Smith's prose is almost like free-writing: you never quite know where it's going to take you. And I think Summer might just be her most transportive work yet. The thematic ground she covers is expansive, but her intimate approach through the eyes of several characters makes the experience immediate and real. She has mastered the art of slippage between space and time, tying her themes together with some key characters and motifs.

Summer is also very much a novel of the moment, addressing recent and current world events. In many ways, reading it feels a little like opening a time capsule onto summer 2020. But Smith also never loses the context of history, and I hope this means it will age well.

Reading Summer captures the daydream feeling of a summer afternoon: "Even while I'm right at the heart of it I just can't get to the heart of it."

Summer is the last book in Ali Smith’s fantastic quartet, which I have been reading since Autumn 2019 during the seasons that they were set. Each book is a slice of absolutely contemporary British life, with references to concerns and feelings that people in this country are having right now. Summer is so up to date that there are even references to the George Floyd protests.

All four books are characterised by a number of interweaving themes and interesting protagonists, rather than by a strong narrative plot. I would like to go back and re-read all four consecutively as one large novel, and maybe identify the themes I wasn’t clever enough to pick up the first time.

Summer was a wonderful conclusion to the quartet and thoroughly deserves 5 stars from me. I hope that it is nominated for (and wins!) many awards this year.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

What a fabulous ending to the Seasonal quartet. Summer brings together some of the characters and themes from the previous books and does it beautifully. Reading it was a very rewarding as well as an emotional experience. I didn’t want it to end but of course, it ended at exactly the right point.

Ali Smith is a wonderful writer, intelligent, playful, imaginative and inspirational. Summer is my book of the year so far and I’m very much looking forward to rereading the quartet as one now that all the books have been published.

Thank you Penguin and Netgalley, I’m delighted to have been given the opportunity to read an advance copy of Summer.

The final part of Smith’s seasons quartet and it doesn’t disappoint. As always, Smith gets straight to the heart of the matter and dives straight into the current affairs of 2020, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent murder of George Floyd. Smith doesn’t pull any punches “the people in charge of England right now are geniuses of manipulation”.

As with her other books, Summer can be read independently but there are elements of Autumn, Winter and Spring to be discovered throughout and what a delight to make the connections through the series. I didn’t want the story to end and I was disappointed when I finished!

Smith’s novels are truly poetic and multi-layered and it is a joy to read them. Can’t wait to read them all again.

And so the excellent seasonal quartet is completed with Summer a time for hope (not hate). Once again Ali Smith considers the state of a country that has struggled with itself since 2016 and now has to face a pandemic. The novel is up to date, as always, even including a reference to the tragic murder of George Floyd.

As with all the books in this series Summer is shining a light on our politicians, their incompetence, and their cruel treatment of some of the most vulnerable in our society. The pandemic has highlighted the incompetence of those that wanted to be in a position of power to make money for themselves and their pals. The state institutions that they wanted to destroy, the people who have never been properly valued are now holding this country together.
This novel uses many of the characters and themes in previous novels and once again S4A4 a private security firm is there to carry out the governments cruel policies.
In Spring we read about the Immigration Removal Centres and in Summer we learn about the migrant camps in the 1940s which included Jewish German migrants. We learn about Einstein spending time in Norfolk.

Having completed the series I will now return to the beginning and read all four books again as I feel there. are so many links and connections that reading the four novels as one, rather than separately, will help me connect the different threads.

Summer is the final book in an excellent series. All four books are highly recommended.

Ali Smith could scarcely have chosen more interesting times for the setting for her quartet of seasonal novels and ‘Summer’ has finished the progression off appropriately, if the story can ever be said to be finished. I can’t better the many reviews already out there detailing the links between the four books and I can appreciate that they are probably best read close together in sequence.

Everything I enjoy about her writing is here - engaging characters, cultural references and her observations about language (I was especially taken with the discussion of the term ‘letterbox’). A couple of examples that struck me most:

‘I don’t want all those old shed-skin selves following me everywhere putting their footprints all through the good clean new-fallen snow of my life.’

‘And summer’s surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We’re always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it’s not just possible but assured, there’s a natural harmony that’ll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you.’

Just brilliant, not to be missed, though the first in the series ‘Autumn’ remains my favourite.

This is a marvellous and thoughtful novel that captures the horrors of 2020. I came to it without having read the three previous novels. I found it funny, sad, beautiful and so many things in between. I now intend to go back and read Autumn, Winter and Spring.

The last of the seasonal quartet and what a finale. A contemporary novel encompassing the current affairs of 2020 thus far – Brexit, global COVID-19 pandemic, immigration detention centres, homelessness and the murder of George Floyd. These highly topical subjects are all cleverly woven into each of the seemingly separate backstories, that themselves are intriguingly connected. It would be interesting to read an alternative version of Summer if these horrors of 2020 hadn’t occurred.
Each of the brilliant quartet novels stands alone, but together they are a masterpiece.

After reading the first three of the quartet, I was curious as to how Ali Smith might somehow manage to tie everything together with this closing instalment.. Familiar faces from all prior seasons return throughout Summer, but more than closing the circle, the last in the series ends things on an open, incomplete, hopeful note. Although it's not easy to see the current global (and UK) crises as anything but chaos partly wrought by joyless opportunists, Smith convinces us -- at least for the duration of the book, a miraculous enough feat as Covid-19 and Brexit doubly devastate the national psyche -- that much bigger changes, way beyond parochial, money-grubbing agendas and the mendacious marshalling of the masses against their own interests, are always afoot, and that, sappy as it may sound (these are the least cynical works of fiction I can think of, despite numerous barbs against predictable villains), faith in the best of us -- and the sense that we're all fundamentally the same -- has never been more important. Resistance is not futile. There are always heroic, galvanising, against-the-grain examples -- Lorenza Mazetti, Greta Thunberg, Albert Einstein -- if we need them, and we've rarely needed them more.

'And summer's surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We're always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We're always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we'll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we'll be treated well by the world. Like there's really a kinder finale and it's not just possible but assured, there's a natural harmony that'll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you. As if what it was always all about, your time on earth, was the full happy stretch of all the muscles of the body on a warmed patch of grass, one long sweet stem of that grass in the mouth.

Care free.

What a thought.

Summer.

The Summer's Tale.

There's no such play.

Don't be fooled, Grace.

The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account -- because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of socalled or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.

Not even this one she's in exists. Even though it's apparently the best summer so far of the century. Not even when she's quite literally walking down a road as beautiful and archetypal as this through an actual perfect summer afternoon.

So we mourn it while we're in it.

Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer.

Even while I'm right at the heart of it I just can't get to the heart of it.'

Thank you Netgalley and Penguin UK for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.

Summer is the fourth and final novel in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, once again combining past and present and punning language to explore different episodes with current relevance. In this one, the climate crisis, COVID-19, internment camps, and Einstein are all important, along with the previous recurring themes of immigration and detention centres, and of family and divides. The modern day narrative starts with Sacha and her brother Robert live in Brighton, where Sacha wants to change the world and Robert seems to delight in upsetting it, and their parents have split up but live next door to each other. After this, the narrative jumps to the 1940s, and then continues to move around different character's stories to bring things together.

The main question I had going into Summer was whether it would feature coronavirus, considering how up to date the other ones were, and it does, though doesn't focus on it extensively. From reading other comments about it, it is apparent that there's a lot of recurring things and characters from the previous three books, though the only one I noticed was the security firm that run the detention centres, as it's a while since I've read the others. Overall, I found this one harder to get into than the others—I enjoyed the start in the present day, but as the narrative moved around, I couldn't keep track of who people were or why they mattered. Possibly it would've been better to read immediately after rereading the other three, as then it would've likely felt like a kind of conclusion or coming together, so this might be one only for people who've read (and remember well) the other seasonal novels.

After reading all four, I think Spring was my favourite, and this one didn't feel like it went anywhere. However, it did feature a lot of expected Ali Smith elements and it was nice to have a book that picked up on some of the political concerns of COVID-19 without being a 'pandemic' novel. The whole quartet might be something to go back and reread further away from the 'modern day' that they weave in with historical narratives, and to fully appreciate how they link together.

This novel touched on so many people's stories and when it ended I just wanted to hear more.(which I always see as a good thing). I think the story of Grace and John is my favourite - the lines are so beautifully written and vividly described.

Ali Smith is still on form and I think this was such a wonderful way to end the seasonal quartet - I'm just sad there won't be more!

Beautiful cover, too.

Summer. The word and all it's connotations has drastically changed in 2020 and Ali Smith has taken a stab at it.
Impressively featuring contemporary references to the George Floyd killing and protests, and letters written by a character on July 1st 2020.
While sometimes these details can feel a bit tacked on, compared to the more wrought sections about the Daniel Gluck and his experience in the Isle of Man internment camp during WW2.
Overall I really enjoyed this book, part standard Smith fare - the reader learns loads about an esoteric part of history- part ambitious chronicle of our times.
Sometimes you don't have to be the best, just the first.
Einstein On The Heath (Rating: 7/10)

‘Summer is a merry tale out of a sad one’. Well we live in hope it’s a merry one.

Well, you either like Ali Smith’s style or you don’t but what I do like about her books is that they are different and thoughtful. This is the final book in the seasonal quartet and I really wish I’d read them back to back because they are instalments of one book. There are recurring characters both real and fictional, a recurring organisation in S4A4 with the same themes running throughout. These include political comments (often swipes rather than takes!) current events, art and literature.

I really like the start of this one with the Greenlaw family in Brighton which is darkly funny and wickedly clever in places. It is set in the context of a post Brexit and Covid19 world and I like how one of the messages is that of hope once this is beaten. The first part introduces the theme of Space and Time as 13 year old Robert is fascinated by Einstein and Words as a character is composing a modern lexicography. Some of that is very funny. I love Grace Greenlaw’s reflections on a marvellous and immortal summer she spends in Suffolk in 1989 where she is acting in plays. Grace reminds us that we are always heading towards summer (well I certainly am!) but it’s a slippery season and it’s transient. I also love the letters Sacha writes to Hero in the detention centre from Spring in which she vividly describes our summer bird visitor - the swift. Swifts are also summer to me and so this resonates. I log their arrival like Sacha (usually 6/5 - 12/5 here), observe and marvel at their aeronautic acrobatics and weep at their departure in early August as they head back to Africa. They are the most incredible birds as Sacha demonstrates vividly. I like the art theme which this time features Lorenza Mozzetti and the literature with Shakespeare’s Winters Tale, Dickens and Keats.

However, the book lost me in the middle although I can see how it links to the detention centres which is a focus of Spring and the characters are from Autumn but it does find its way back again in the final third and you understand how it relates to the first section.

Overall, it’s clever and I really like parts of it although Autumn remains my favourite of the four. I will read them again but this time as one rather than separately then I think the links between all four will have deeper meaning.

With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin General UK, Hamish Hamilton for the ARC.

This is the conclusion to Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. I didn't think this was the strongest, but I enjoyed it nevertheless because I like Smith's writing.
It's more of slice of lifestyle that doesn't really follow a clear plot.

If you enjoyed the others, you won't be disappointed.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

The conclusion to her seasonal quartet sees Smith doing what she does - word play, slice of life scenes and intertextuality (so many references to many things I'm not clever enough to understand fully).

I did find this a bit messier than Spring, and Autumn which have been my favourite of the four without question. I struggled with Winter and in the end Summer probably paid a price of the intention of the project. Publishing so close to the time of writing that there is even a George Floyd reference. But, the beginning of the book was clearly written in a time that while only recent also seems like an age ago. The Floyd reference feels shoehorned and that's not Smith's fault. With so much else on her plate it's no wonder she can't fit in a more in-depth exploration - the virus, the environment, Brexit and detention centres already hot issues she's drawing on, with Brexit and the environment a through line of the whole series.

Much like life at the moment I found there was a bit too much going on here.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is an absolute must read for the time we are in. The books focuses on two families, decades apart but both in the midst of extraordinary summers, and slowly forms a connection between the two.
This felt like an urgent read - touching on our current pandemic, political landscape, climate change and the many focuses of this summer in such a beautiful and intelligent way. Although not poetry, the writing is so profound and insightful that it almost reads like poetry - I feel wiser just from spending a few days with it, and have never read anything that felt so personal to me. A must read for this unusual time!