The Shakespeare allusion is critical as with the miraculous rebirth of Hermione at the end of the play, the Greenlaws stir into new life, blooming against the backdrop of a world on the brink, peering into a night sky “at the lit pinpoints in the dark that meant the ancient and original and already dead stars.” When you’re stuck in the world at its worst, that’s important. It’s like it says, don’t worry, another world is possible. As Grace notes: “ ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is all about summer, really. “Summer” argues passionately for art as our best weapon to vanquish the chaos of the present, probing the season’s gossamer mystique with a delicate array of motifs: a mysterious sculpture, a female avant-garde filmmaker, Einstein, flocks of swifts, even Shakespeare. (Readers will recognize Daniel from “Autumn,” the first novel in the quartet Smith braids characters from her other books into “Summer,” a startling, gratifying method.) She’s at the top of her game here, dovetailing flashbacks with foreground story in sumptuous sentences, capturing the shameful plight of World War II - and present-day - detainees. … He flickers and flashes like one of the arcade machines on the pier.”Īn unexpected meeting lures the family back into the past as they journey for an audience with Daniel Gluck, a 104-year-old languishing in a limbo where his memories of World War II meld with conflicts from the here and now. To Sacha, “it’s as if Robert has attached a dimmer switch to his own brilliance and like he is randomly turning it down as low and dark as it can go then thunking it up to dazzling.

A middle-aged divorcée with a theatrical background, Grace Greenlaw grapples with parenting her two teenagers, Sacha, a liberal firebrand, and Robert, the astute if difficult younger brother. Mostly set in southern Britain in February 2020, “Summer” tracks a fearful nation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as businesses grind to a halt and families shelter, glowering, in their houses. With “Summer,” the final installment, she looms her themes and arcs - Brexit, the refugee crisis, women artists, the surge of demagogues such as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump - into a shimmering tapestry of rage and redemption. Ali Smith has been called “Scotland’s Nobel-laureate-in waiting,” her seasonal quartet breathing vigor into the tired conceit that the personal is political.

Summer by ali smith