Estate

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 q

Summer. A season that stretches out like a cat in the sun as the long days and warm nights seem to open us up to infinite possibilities and instills us with ‘ that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again, ’ such as F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in The Great Gatsby . And with summer, I have Leggi tutto

season by season, i spent a year with this series. it feels like everyone should be rationed out a perfectly weather-appropriate read every few months. and i for one can't quite believe it's over! this series went off the rails of why i loved it for a bit, but in this one it was capital B Back, with l Leggi tutto

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 stat Leggi tutto

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 writ Leggi tutto

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, her Leggi tutto

‘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 Leggi tutto