Summer

The fourth and final novel in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, Summer weaves together multiple timelines and perspectives to connect a contemporary Brighton family, a 104-year-old man's wartime memories, his sister's resistance work in occupied France, and several other characters whose lives intersect across decades. Set against Brexit, the early COVID-19 pandemic, and the cultural mood of 2020 Britain, the novel explores how people endure political darkness, loss, and separation.

The novel opens with an unnamed narrator reflecting on the culture of indifference that has characterized recent British public life, the dismissive "so?" that greeted deportations, government overreach, and environmental catastrophe. The narrator describes a moving image from a postwar British film: a slight man carrying two suitcases, performing a wild, graceful dance along a narrow ledge high above London's rooftops.

In Brighton, in February 2020, 16-year-old Sacha Greenlaw eats breakfast while her mother, Grace, paces the front room trying to recall a literary quotation about being the heroine of one's own life. Grace refuses to look it up online, insisting on exercising her memory. The previous night, mother and daughter argued about whether the internet counts as a primary source for a school essay; their dispute ended in laughter and a warm embrace. The television blares because Sacha's 13-year-old brother, Robert, has hidden the remote.

The Greenlaw family is fractured. Their father, Jeff, lives next door with his younger girlfriend, Ashley, a Welsh woman who has completely lost her ability to speak. Robert has been banned from their house after stealing Ashley's harp and telling her she is unwelcome in the country. On her way to school, Sacha worries about the Australian wildfires and anti-Asian racism facing her friend Melanie's Chinese grandmother amid early coronavirus reports. Near the school gate, Robert texts her urgently. She skips school and meets him on the beach, where he presses a glass eggtimer into her palm and superglues it to her fingers. Since she worries there is no time left, he texts, now she always has "time on her hands."

The narrative shifts into Robert's perspective, revealing a volatile inner world. Once a child who made short films and won singing prizes, Robert has become deliberately provocative after online bullying followed him between schools. He parrots right-wing political language in class, plays a violent online torture game called ABUSEHEAP, and obsesses over Einstein. When he sneaks home, he discovers visitors: Arthur (Art) and Charlotte, who run an online platform called Art in Nature. They had taken Sacha to the hospital after the eggtimer cut her hand. Art carries a round marble stone, a memento from his dead mother, to be delivered to a man in Suffolk she named in her will. Robert falls instantly in love with Charlotte.

The family conversation touches on Brexit, Ashley's manuscript The Immoral Imagination, and the distortion of political language. Charlotte mentions the filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti's film Together, about two deaf men in postwar London, and tells Robert to tell Ashley about it. Charlotte and Art invite the Greenlaws to join them in Suffolk. Grace agrees.

The narrative then shifts to Daniel Gluck—the man in Suffolk that Art's mother named in her will. In the summer of 1940, Daniel, born in England to a German father and a German-Jewish mother, is interned as an 'enemy alien' at Ascot racecourse alongside his father, Walter. They are taken from their home for what is supposed to be brief questioning but are never allowed to return, eventually arriving at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. There Daniel befriends Cyril Klein, a former medical student, and encounters the artist Kurt, who performs a piece repeating the German word leise (quiet) with escalating volume until he smashes a cup and saucer. Daniel feels he is breathing fully for the first time in years.

In the present, Daniel is 104, cared for by Paulina, a Romanian woman, and visited on Fridays by his neighbor's daughter, Elisabeth. He drifts between past and present. In memory, he composes a long letter to his sister Hannah about camp life and Rilke, signs it "your ever summer brother," then tears the pages and burns them, as the siblings had agreed to protect each other's safety.

Hannah's wartime story unfolds in occupied France, where she operates under a false identity, trawling graveyards for the names of those who died young and passing the information through a network that creates forged identity papers. She meets Claude, a resistance fighter who becomes her lover before he is killed. She arrives in Nice with a baby daughter, works as a courier, and guides groups across the mountains into Switzerland. When the Nazis replace the Italian occupiers, Hannah entrusts her child to a hotel owner, Madame Etienne, and her husband. She writes a letter to Daniel about the child, then burns it, signing it "your autumn sister."

When the visitors arrive in Suffolk, Robert enters through the French windows and Daniel mistakes him for Hannah at age 12. Art presents the marble stone, and Daniel declares the visitors have brought back "the child." Elisabeth places the stone in the curve of a mother-and-child sculpture by Barbara Hepworth that Daniel has kept all his life, reuniting its two pieces. Daniel holds Art's hand and falls asleep.

Grace searches Suffolk for a church she visited 30 years earlier as a 22-year-old actress touring with a theater company. In a 1989 flashback, she wandered down a lane and spent an afternoon with a joiner named John Mison, who taught her about wildflowers and the architectural meaning of "summer" as a load-bearing beam. In 2020, the church is disused and locked. Nearby, a massive electrified fence surrounds an immigration detention centre. She finds the old gravestone with its carved poem, but her photograph captures only a blur. At supper, Grace finally recognizes the quotation she has been chasing: It is the opening of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

An essayistic passage recounts the life of Lorenza Mazzetti, whose aunt and cousins, members of the Einstein family, were murdered by Wehrmacht officers in Tuscany in 1944. Mazzetti arrived in England, struggled through menial jobs, and talked her way into the Slade School of Art. She made Together and, with Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson, co-founded Free Cinema, a British film movement of the 1950s. She spent her life creating art from the rupture between innocence and violence.

Through the pandemic, Sacha writes letters to Hero, a Vietnamese microbiologist who was sealed in a container for weeks to reach England and has been detained in an immigration removal centre near Brighton for nearly three years. She describes the swifts that arrive each summer, connecting their freedom to his confinement. Charlotte, isolated in Cornwall with Art's elderly aunt Iris, retreats to her bedroom for days, grieving her partnership with Art, who has fallen in love with Elisabeth and stayed in Suffolk. Iris, undaunted, removes the front door locks and prepares the house to shelter released detainees. Charlotte emerges after learning that Robert has sent Daniel one of the quarter-size violins that belonged to his late grandmother—a French concert violinist whose five instruments the family keeps in a cupboard but never plays—with a note reading "Best wishes from your sister, Robert Greenlaw." She proposes to Art that they publish Ashley's writing and write about Mazzetti.

In the final letter, dated 1 July 2020, Hero reveals his Vietnamese name, Anh Kiet, meaning "brother" and "masterpiece" separately, "hero" together. He has been released and is living with 15 other freed detainees in Cornwall with Charlotte and Iris. He tends the garden and has seen the swifts in his sky. He signs the letter "your friend and brother."