The fourth novel in the Seasonal Quartet by Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith is “a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke, and seizing the moment” (The New York Times).

In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just istrouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.

This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?

Summer.

'Sublime. … Smith has completed what must be considered both one of modern fiction’s most elusive and most important undertakings. … No novelist has come closer to describing the particular sad informed madness of our times.”—Boston Globe

A Best Book of the Year: NPR, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews • Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction