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    Summer
    Summer
    Summer
    Audiobook9 hours

    Summer

    Written by Ali Smith

    Narrated by Juliette Burton

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 25, 2020
    ISBN9781980085645
    Summer
    Author

    Ali Smith

    Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and Newham College, Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995) won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her novel Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker. She lives in Cambridge.

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    • Winter
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    Reviews for Summer

    4/5

    127 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The final novel in Smith’s seasonal quartet unites and completes the set. Like the previous three novels in the set, its themes include politics, immigration, family, love, loss, language, and the visual arts. It’s the first fiction I’ve read that speaks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each novel in the quartet reflects on the work of a 20th-century female visual artist, with Italian filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti as the featured artist in this book.The elderly Daniel Gluck is a recurring character who first appeared in Autumn, and readers learn much more about his family and his personal history during World War II and the Holocaust. His young neighbor, Elisabeth, also reappears. Charlotte, Art, and Iris return from Winter. Summer introduces teen siblings Sacha and Robert Greenlaw and their mother, former actress Grace. A series of circumstances brings all of these characters together, yet Smith gives her readers the sense that their destinies were already intertwined.
    • 4/5
      I've read the seasonal quartet over a period of several years and feel like I should read them again all together. Maybe I will because I love the writing style; the stories that slip past each other; and the way the author looks at complex issues without necessarily making them the centre of the story. I like her complex characters who are so very real. This novel deals with Brexit, the early days of COVID, children coming of age, family breakups, and more....but it's about the people: Grace, her kids Sacha and Robert, Daniel, Hannah and Charlotte.
    • 5/5
      Smith's books always amuse and make you wonder. She is like Emily Dickinson, looking at life aslant.
    • 3/5
      When it’s good, it’s very very good, but the other bits...! Smith’s distinctive style throughout the quartet has made her easy to parody, and there are so many characters by this point that the drifting between narratives is rather hard to follow. Doesn’t hang together well, in my opinion, but there are enough fine vignettes to remind you of the author’s class.
    • 5/5
      I think I'm destined to spend the rest of my life thinking about this stunning quartet of books and wondering: (a) how did Ali Smith write something so fast FOUR TIMES; and (b) how do these super-relevant books contain such beauty amidst such sorrow? Summer is a novel about COVID-19, but it is about so much more than that. There is death but also life, isolation but community, sorrow and unbelievable joy. And summer. Always summer.

      I won't say too much about the plot, but a refresher of Autumn and Winter would help you, as some characters do come back around. And the way such vastly different stories weave together shouldn't work but totally DOES. Smith is a writing sorceress and deserves a Booker.
    • 5/5
      A novel novel, about a broken family, about truth, about social media, about the climate crisis, about immigration, about the novel coronavirus pandemic and many other things.The lightness of play with words and their multiple meanings.The book links back to the stories told and characters in the previous books in this quartet.This book looks forward to the future.This novel makes me look afresh, again.Wonderful.