Charlotte gets to watch someone be the person she thought she was: an activist who actually takes action.

Robert and Sacha, both idealistic in their own ways, seem to soften a little and become less rigid in their teenage world views. Grace, formerly a creative ‘free-spirit’ who now placidly and almost absent-mindedly thinks like a fascist Brexiteer, remembers who she once was. Not much space is given to what happens in the present it’s more about how summer and the memories it evokes and opportunities it presents change the characters in some way. But you don’t need to have read the first three to keep up with this novel. The main plot follows Grace and her teenage children Sacha and Robert who randomly meet Art and Charlotte from Winter and decide to accompany them on a journey to visit Daniel Gluck from Autumn. In Summer we meet new characters and are reunited with some from the previous seasonal novels. The book is quite fragmented, though less so than its predecessors, and though it borrows from literary classics, it’s an original Smith in terms of tone and dialogue.

In these books we get the immediacy of our cultural present propped up by references to other books and art forms, which is on-brand for Ali Smith. Smith’s project begun in 2016, with Autumn, and since then she has published one book a year, tackling the mess we have all been going through or witnessing over the past few years: Brexit, xenophobia, misogyny, climate change, Coronavirus and more. Ali Smith, Summer (Hamish Hamilton: 2020, 9780241207062)Īnd so Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet comes to an end.

Summer ali smith review