Summer by Ali Smith

What if I told you that your heart will bloom with the particular fusion of hope and sadness that only the feeling of being seen by a book can produce, when you read Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet? Summer is the end of that quartet, and it incorporates a love for the mail, the cyclical atrocities of internment camps, and the effect that political windbags are having on our children, while somehow also re-instilling faith in the power of human connection. —Jess