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Summer

A Novel

Author Ali Smith
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On sale May 11, 2021 | 400 Pages | 9781101969977
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.
  • WINNER | 2021
    Orwell Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2021
    Women's Prize for Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction

“Sublime. . . . Smith has completed what must be considered both one of modern fiction's most elusive and most important undertakings. . . . No novelist has come closer to describing the particular sad informed madness of our times.” 
The Boston Globe

“A prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment.” 
The New York Times

“Rich with references, characters quick to share stories about artists and their work, and the misfits and heroes of history, Summer is more than a perennial season. It is the bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day’s vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer. ” 
The Washington Post
  
“A revelation of endurance and a balm even in the worst of times.” 
Los Angeles Times

“Written under time pressure and fueled by dismay, outrage, hope, heart, wit, and serious talent, the books span four years. . . . What will keep them fresh long after the news cycle has moved on is their passionate engagement with universal issues such as grief, injustice, human warmth and cruelty, and the life-enhancing powers of love, art, and decency. . . . Brilliant.” 
—NPR
  
“Ms. Smith has crafted something that speaks to this moment, but the impression it leaves will similarly unsettle and last.” 
The Wall Street Journal
 
“A thrilling crescendo. . . . Incantatory.” 
O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Triumphant. . . . Smith’s visionary series, ambitious in its scale and towering in its achievements, will be studied and imitated for decades to come.” 
Esquire
 
“A project that questions the fragile, unbreakable role of art in making sense of a world that is always slightly beyond our comprehension. . . . An intergenerational patchwork illustrating both the trends of our times and a meditation on time itself. . . . Few authors can match [Smith’s] playful, wrenching prose.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“A shimmering tapestry of rage and redemption. . . . [Smith is] a magnanimous stylist with an ear like none other, a command of both mania and poise that feels beautifully tailored to our time. . . . Smith will be studied for decades to come, a beacon to future readers eager to wrest meaning from our turbulent moment.” 
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“In Ali Smith’s Summer, the present, like the past, both exists and does not exist, adds up to the same thing, and proves inexorably different. . . . A miracle.” 
Ploughshares
 
“Deeply affecting. . . . Powerfully absorbing. . . . Wise, funny, unsentimental and exhilarating.” 
Financial Times
 
“A vast and dizzyingly ambitious project. . . . A work that has risen to the challenges of the era that summoned it, but also a series of novels that will endure, telling future generations what it was to live in these fraught and febrile times, and how, through art, we survived.” 
The Observer
 
“Stunning. . . . [Smith] envisions the shape of life as something more wildly elemental than the neat idea that our days on earth run from point A to B. . . . There is so much pleasure in Summer. . . . The typically Smithian interweaving of so many important, small voices makes this a complete universe. . . . Art, justice and nature are all given their due.” 
The Sunday Times (London)
 
“Revelatory. . . . This singular writer has found her moment.” 
—Prospect Magazine
 
“A deeply resonant finale to a work that should come to be recognized as a classic.” 
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
© Christian Sinibaldi

ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, SummerSpring, 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.

View titles by Ali Smith
Everybody said: so?
 
As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me.
 
Okay, not everybody said it. I’m speaking colloquially, like in that phrase everybody’s doing it. What I mean is, it was a clear marker, just then, of that particular time; a kind of litmus, this dismissive note. It got fashionable around then to act like you didn’t care. It got fashionable, too, to insist the people who did care, or said they cared, were either hopeless losers or were just showing off.
 
It’s like a lifetime ago.
 
But it isn’t – it’s literally only a few months since a time when people who’d lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported: so?
 
And when a government shut down its own parliament because it couldn’t get the result it wanted: so?
 
When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them: so?
 
When a continent burned and another melted: so?
 
When people in power across the world started picking off groups of people by religion, ethnicity, sexuality, intellectual or political dissent: so?
 
But no. True. Not everybody said it.
 
Not by a country mile.
 
Millions of people didn’t say it.
 
Millions and millions, all across the country and all across the world, saw the lying, and the mistreatments of people and the planet, and were vocal about it, on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page.
 
To which the people who knew the power of saying so? said, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page: so?
 
I mean, I could spend my whole life listing things about, and talking about, and demonstrating with sources and graphs and examples and statistics, what history’s made it clear happens when we’re indifferent, and what the consequences are of the political cultivation of indifference, which whoever wants to disavow will dismiss in an instant with their own punchy little
 
so?
 
So.
 
Instead, here’s something I once saw.
 
It’s an image from a film made in the UK roughly seventy years ago, not long after the end of the Second World War.
 
The film was made in London by a young artist who arrived in the city from Italy when London was one of the many places having to rebuild themselves in those years nearly a lifetime ago, after the tens of millions of people of all ages all across the world had died before their time.
 
It’s an image of a man carrying two suitcases.
 
He’s a slight man, a young man, a distracted and tentative kind of a man, dapper in a hat and jacket, light on his feet but at the same time burdened; it’s clear he’d be burdened even if he wasn’t carrying two suitcases. He is grave, slim, preoccupied, terribly keen, and he is silhouetted against the sky because he’s balanced on a very narrow brick ledge which runs round the edge of a high building, along the length of which he’s doing a joyous and frantic dance with the beaten-up rooftops of London behind him; no: more precisely, those roofs are way below him.
 
How can he be going so fast and not fall off the edge of the building?
 
How can what he’s doing be so wild and still so graceful, so urgent and blithe both at once?
 
How can he be swinging those cases around in the air like that and still keep his balance? How can he be moving at such speed next to the sheer drop?
 
Why is he risking everything?
 
There’d be no point in showing you a still or a photo of this. It’s very much a moving image.
 
For several seconds he does a crazed but merry high-wire dance above the city going far too fast along the zigzagging path of a ledge that’s the width of a single brick.
 
So:

About

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.

Awards

  • WINNER | 2021
    Orwell Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2021
    Women's Prize for Fiction

Praise

A Best Book of the Year: NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction

“Sublime. . . . Smith has completed what must be considered both one of modern fiction's most elusive and most important undertakings. . . . No novelist has come closer to describing the particular sad informed madness of our times.” 
The Boston Globe

“A prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment.” 
The New York Times

“Rich with references, characters quick to share stories about artists and their work, and the misfits and heroes of history, Summer is more than a perennial season. It is the bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day’s vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer. ” 
The Washington Post
  
“A revelation of endurance and a balm even in the worst of times.” 
Los Angeles Times

“Written under time pressure and fueled by dismay, outrage, hope, heart, wit, and serious talent, the books span four years. . . . What will keep them fresh long after the news cycle has moved on is their passionate engagement with universal issues such as grief, injustice, human warmth and cruelty, and the life-enhancing powers of love, art, and decency. . . . Brilliant.” 
—NPR
  
“Ms. Smith has crafted something that speaks to this moment, but the impression it leaves will similarly unsettle and last.” 
The Wall Street Journal
 
“A thrilling crescendo. . . . Incantatory.” 
O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Triumphant. . . . Smith’s visionary series, ambitious in its scale and towering in its achievements, will be studied and imitated for decades to come.” 
Esquire
 
“A project that questions the fragile, unbreakable role of art in making sense of a world that is always slightly beyond our comprehension. . . . An intergenerational patchwork illustrating both the trends of our times and a meditation on time itself. . . . Few authors can match [Smith’s] playful, wrenching prose.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“A shimmering tapestry of rage and redemption. . . . [Smith is] a magnanimous stylist with an ear like none other, a command of both mania and poise that feels beautifully tailored to our time. . . . Smith will be studied for decades to come, a beacon to future readers eager to wrest meaning from our turbulent moment.” 
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“In Ali Smith’s Summer, the present, like the past, both exists and does not exist, adds up to the same thing, and proves inexorably different. . . . A miracle.” 
Ploughshares
 
“Deeply affecting. . . . Powerfully absorbing. . . . Wise, funny, unsentimental and exhilarating.” 
Financial Times
 
“A vast and dizzyingly ambitious project. . . . A work that has risen to the challenges of the era that summoned it, but also a series of novels that will endure, telling future generations what it was to live in these fraught and febrile times, and how, through art, we survived.” 
The Observer
 
“Stunning. . . . [Smith] envisions the shape of life as something more wildly elemental than the neat idea that our days on earth run from point A to B. . . . There is so much pleasure in Summer. . . . The typically Smithian interweaving of so many important, small voices makes this a complete universe. . . . Art, justice and nature are all given their due.” 
The Sunday Times (London)
 
“Revelatory. . . . This singular writer has found her moment.” 
—Prospect Magazine
 
“A deeply resonant finale to a work that should come to be recognized as a classic.” 
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author

© Christian Sinibaldi

ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, SummerSpring, 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.

View titles by Ali Smith

Excerpt

Everybody said: so?
 
As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me.
 
Okay, not everybody said it. I’m speaking colloquially, like in that phrase everybody’s doing it. What I mean is, it was a clear marker, just then, of that particular time; a kind of litmus, this dismissive note. It got fashionable around then to act like you didn’t care. It got fashionable, too, to insist the people who did care, or said they cared, were either hopeless losers or were just showing off.
 
It’s like a lifetime ago.
 
But it isn’t – it’s literally only a few months since a time when people who’d lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported: so?
 
And when a government shut down its own parliament because it couldn’t get the result it wanted: so?
 
When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them: so?
 
When a continent burned and another melted: so?
 
When people in power across the world started picking off groups of people by religion, ethnicity, sexuality, intellectual or political dissent: so?
 
But no. True. Not everybody said it.
 
Not by a country mile.
 
Millions of people didn’t say it.
 
Millions and millions, all across the country and all across the world, saw the lying, and the mistreatments of people and the planet, and were vocal about it, on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page.
 
To which the people who knew the power of saying so? said, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page: so?
 
I mean, I could spend my whole life listing things about, and talking about, and demonstrating with sources and graphs and examples and statistics, what history’s made it clear happens when we’re indifferent, and what the consequences are of the political cultivation of indifference, which whoever wants to disavow will dismiss in an instant with their own punchy little
 
so?
 
So.
 
Instead, here’s something I once saw.
 
It’s an image from a film made in the UK roughly seventy years ago, not long after the end of the Second World War.
 
The film was made in London by a young artist who arrived in the city from Italy when London was one of the many places having to rebuild themselves in those years nearly a lifetime ago, after the tens of millions of people of all ages all across the world had died before their time.
 
It’s an image of a man carrying two suitcases.
 
He’s a slight man, a young man, a distracted and tentative kind of a man, dapper in a hat and jacket, light on his feet but at the same time burdened; it’s clear he’d be burdened even if he wasn’t carrying two suitcases. He is grave, slim, preoccupied, terribly keen, and he is silhouetted against the sky because he’s balanced on a very narrow brick ledge which runs round the edge of a high building, along the length of which he’s doing a joyous and frantic dance with the beaten-up rooftops of London behind him; no: more precisely, those roofs are way below him.
 
How can he be going so fast and not fall off the edge of the building?
 
How can what he’s doing be so wild and still so graceful, so urgent and blithe both at once?
 
How can he be swinging those cases around in the air like that and still keep his balance? How can he be moving at such speed next to the sheer drop?
 
Why is he risking everything?
 
There’d be no point in showing you a still or a photo of this. It’s very much a moving image.
 
For several seconds he does a crazed but merry high-wire dance above the city going far too fast along the zigzagging path of a ledge that’s the width of a single brick.
 
So: