Light in darknessShall I compare Ali to a summer’s day?A good one, from some other year than this;Rough winds do shake us all and tempers fray,At Summer’s cease, a hope-smith will be missed.Whether Ali Smith shall turn out to be the hero of our literary times, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, the pages of her Seasonal Quartet must show. Perhaps it’s too soon to judge, but with four state-of-the-nation novels in under four years, is there another author whose attempt comes cl...

What a strange, tumultuous journey it's been over the past four years, but I'm so grateful that I've had Ali Smith's Seasonal novels by my side! Who could have predicted the many unsettling transformations that would take place in our social and political landscape when she began this ambitious writing project back in 2016? The highly contentious Brexit vote described in “Autumn” resulted in the UK officially leaving the EU this year. The conservative ex-mayor of London who was mocked in “Winter...

Longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for FictionAnother wonderful book which completes the set of four seasons. I am a bit late to this one because my copy arrived while I was reading the Booker longlist and there are already several excellent detailed reviews here, so I may keep this one short and focus on personal impressions.Those who have read the earlier books will recognise some of the characters (for a comprehensive list of connections see Gumble's Yard's review) but once again there are...

‘’No point in asking anyone else to hold your world.’’ In the last instalment of the monumental Seasonal Quartet, Ali Smith introduces to families that have to fight their own demons, siblings who view the world differently, mothers whose vocation was lost somewhere in the process of having a family, couples that can’t decide what they want from their lives, ideas that have gone awry, evils of the past that are still pretty much alive and kicking. People thrown into the tides of forces that c

Summer brother autumn sisterTime and time again are goneOut of season I will find herWith time’s fallen leaves behind herEvery time I sing this song Summer uses the characters of Autumn and Winter to explore the themes of Spring (while also making it clear that those themes ran through the full quartet) through a new shared experience for us all.Featuring:Wendy, Elisabeth, Zoe, Daniel, Hannah, Adrienne Albert, Klein, Pauline Boty - from Autumn Charlotte, Art, Iris, Sophia (in memory), Barbara

1So you finally got a copy of the fourth book?Uh huh...A bit behind the times, aren't you? Summer's nearly over.Shh. Can't you see I'm reading! Would have thought you'd have been quicker off the mark, is all...Sorry, it's just that I've reached the page where there's a stone I recognise.One of the Stones, is it? Wow! It's a Hepworth marble stone, not a bloody rolling stone. What the...Never mind. Go to sleep.Barbara Hepworth……………………………………2You look like you had a bad night.No one makes me not sle...

The timely publishing gimmick of this quartet badly backfired when the pandemic arrived. You can imagine the scenario: Smith only has a few weeks before the book needs to be delivered and suddenly life as we've always known it dramatically changes. How can you write a series of novels about the state of the nation and leave out Covid and lockdown? So she has to hurriedly shoehorn it in. And, not surprisingly, the result is messy and unconvincing. Especially noticeable when George Floyd's name is...

Summer is the final part of a quartet of novels. Over the last 5 days, I haven’t read just Summer, but I actually read, back to back, Autumn (for the fourth time), Winter (for the third time), Spring (for the second time) and THEN Summer for the first time. I don’t say this in order to boast, but more because I see the quartet as a single work and I think it is best experienced as a single work: I would definitely not recommend reading Summer standalone, but I would 100% recommend reading all fo...

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 b

Read my thoughts in the Irish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo...

Because summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness. And summer’s surely really all about an imagined end.The triumphant conclusion of Ali Smith's seasonal quarter ... or have we just imagined it's over?For those keen to spot the repeated themes and motifs, here's my Seasonal Quartet bingo cardSee my twin brother's review for the best take on this book and more detail on all the connections with the rest of the series: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

‘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...

Every year since 2016, Ali Smith has delighted readers with annual instalments of the seasonal quartet. Autumn, Winter, Spring featured among my favourite reads in their respective publishing years. I was greatly anticipating reading this last instalment. Many thanks to Penguin UK for approving me for this eARC. Smith continues to bewitch us with her language play, observations, quirky characters, historical recollections, thoughts on art, the environment, political climate. Truthfully, the nove...

In early May I happened to see that the publisher of this work had just received its final edits. That means Ali Smith didn’t have much Time to add the coronavirus pandemic to her manuscript. For the most part (excepting the teenaged Sacha’s correspondence) I think she got it to work, especially Charlotte’s self-imposed, depressive isolation in Iris’s house. Almost certainly Smith would’ve excised things she’d already written, but since this volume is longer than the others, perhaps it was more

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/venues 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 t...

I finished this last night and while I enjoyed it, especially reconnecting with Daniel, I love his part of the novel where he is locked down because of the Covid Virus. He is elderly now and his neighbour looks after him. As he lies in his bed his memory plays tricks on him, and one minute he will be present and coherent and then his memory will slip back to his past.I realized upon finishing that I cannot rate this book at the moment because it should not be read as a standalone novel. This is

“What you’re making of it all?/what will you make of it all?” The above citation is located somewhere halfway through this book. Maybe this was done on purpose by Smith: "reader, what do you make of all this that I've written?". Because that is what - I guess - every reader is asking him/herself, reading this fourth part of her seasonal cyclus, with another sequence of strange scenes, continuous dialogues, memories and hallucinations, etc. If Smith's intention was to stress the opacity of rea