Summer

Summer Plot Summary

Introduction

In a greenhouse that doubles as a classroom, sixteen-year-old Sacha Greenlaw watches her thirteen-year-old brother Robert superglue an hourglass to her hand. The glass shatters, blood flows, but time itself becomes tangible—trapped between her fingers like a cruel gift. This moment of sibling violence and strange tenderness marks the beginning of a summer that will shatter more than glass. Across the fractured landscape of Brexit Britain, where detention centers rise like fortresses and families split along political fault lines, four seemingly unconnected lives converge through chance encounters and inherited memories. An ancient man carries wartime secrets in a seaside house. A mysterious woman resurrects the dead through stolen identities. A filmmaker's legacy bridges decades of trauma and hope. Together, their stories weave through time like swifts crossing continents, carrying messages between past and future, between the living and the lost.

Chapter 1: Divided Siblings: The Greenhouse and the Bunker

The television screams at volume levels that make conversation impossible. Robert has hidden the remote again, another small act of domestic terrorism in a house already split down the middle. Grace Greenlaw stands in the front room shouting fragments of David Copperfield over the noise—"Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life"—while her daughter Sacha scrolls through climate apocalypse on her phone and contemplates a future she refuses to bring children into. Next door, their father Jeff lives with Ashley, his much younger Welsh girlfriend who has mysteriously stopped speaking. Not lost her voice—stopped making any sound at all. When Sacha deliberately stepped on her foot to test it, Ashley's mouth opened in a silent O of pain, nothing more. She writes now on notepads: "Nothing works. Don't think I haven't tried myself." The family exists in a state of careful choreography around their wounds. Grace maintains the fiction that this arrangement is civilized, adult, European. The children know better. Robert, brilliant and damaged by online harassment that followed him from school to school, has developed a fascination with historical atrocities and a troubling admiration for political strongmen. He spends hours playing ABUSEHEAP, a torture simulation game that teaches him the history of human cruelty with clinical precision. When strangers Arthur and Charlotte arrive at their door—having brought Sacha home from the hospital after Robert's hourglass prank—they bring news of a hundred-and-four-year-old man in Suffolk who knew Arthur's mother. The old man, they say, lived through internment camps and carries stories that refuse to die. Arthur carries a stone his dead mother wanted delivered, though he can't remember why. Grace, desperate to escape the toxic atmosphere of her divided home, suggests they all drive to Suffolk together. It's a mad idea—traveling with strangers to meet another stranger. But madness feels safer than staying trapped between the greenhouse heat of their rage and the bunker mentality that Brexit has bred in their bones.

Chapter 2: Memory's Barbed Wire: Daniel's Summer of Internment

Daniel Gluck wakes in someone else's house, in someone else's care, carrying someone else's memories. At one hundred and four, he exists in multiple time zones simultaneously—his body in a bed in 2020, his mind cycling through the camps of 1940. The Romanian caregiver, Paulina, bathes his ancient skin and listens to him speak of camping, not understanding that his camping was imprisonment, his holiday a barbed-wire beach on the Isle of Man. The memories surface like bodies from deep water. His father, Walter, arrested on a morning when William Bell came for tea and never left. Their house searched, their matches confiscated, their killing jars taken—no more butterflies for Walter's collection. They were Germans living in England when being German became a crime punishable by exile to an island where the locals called it luxury accommodation and the Daily Mail claimed they had golf courses and fried eggs. In the camp, Daniel found unexpected beauty. Artists and intellectuals, refugees from fascism, created a university behind wire. Rawicz and Landauer, who had played for the King and Queen, gave concerts on pianos shipped from Liverpool. A man called Kurt made sculptures from moldy porridge and performed acts of brilliant madness, shouting the word "quiet" until it became a roar that shattered teacups and expectations. His friend Cyril taught him German-English, English-German, the slippery spaces between languages where meaning lives and dies. Cyril's brother Zel had lost his voice in Dachau, another kind of silence, another form of internment. They waited at the gates each morning for mail that never came, for news of family who had vanished into the dark machinery of war. Daniel wrote letters to his sister Hannah on good paper borrowed from an artist who drew his daughter as a balloon-carrying child walking through hell unharmed. He wrote of hope and butterflies, of concerts and friendship, of the way even imprisonment couldn't kill wonder. Then he burned every letter, sending the words to her as smoke and ash, trusting the wind to carry what the postal service could not.

Chapter 3: Hannah's Crossing: A Woman in Wartime

Hannah Gluck moves through occupied France like smoke through a house on fire—visible only when the light catches her at certain angles. She is Adrienne Albert, seamstress, according to her papers. The real Adrienne Albert died at eighteen months in Nancy, of Spanish flu, but names have power beyond death. Hannah resurrects the forgotten dead, giving their identities to the living who need new selves to survive. She learned this magic from Claude, the beautiful mimic who could become anyone, fool anyone, make anyone laugh even as the world burned around them. He taught her to see papers not as documents but as possibilities, identities not as fixed things but as costumes that could be worn, discarded, shared. When Claude disappeared—captured, tortured, probably dead—Hannah carried on the work alone. The baby came unexpectedly, born of their brief joy in a Paris cellar while bombs fell like deadly stars. The child looks like her father in certain light, like Hannah's brother Daniel in others. This gives Hannah hope that family persists even when scattered across continents, even when separated by war and silence. She tells the baby stories while they hide in coastal hotels, fairy tales about summer days that argue with gods, about flowers that survive sudden frosts. But her real work happens in darkness. She cycles between graveyards, memorizing names and dates from weathered headstones. With careful reverence, she asks permission from the long-dead, then passes their details to forgers who create new papers for the desperate living. Each resurrection is an act of love—the dead protecting the living, the past sheltering the future. When the Nazis flood the coast, Hannah must choose between the baby and the work. She leaves the child with Madame Etienne, kind young hotelkeeper who promises reading lessons and love. Hannah disappears north to guide more refugees through mountain passes, carrying maps sewn into coat linings, wearing other people's names like armor. She becomes a ghost herself, visible only in the lives she saves.

Chapter 4: Grace's Pilgrimage: Searching for Lost Connections

Grace Greenlaw stands in a Suffolk churchyard, thirty years after she first discovered it during a touring production of The Winter's Tale. She had been twenty-two then, sleeping with half the cast and searching for something she couldn't name. Now, at fifty-two, divorced and bitter, she searches still—but for what? The church is locked, the graveyard overgrown, the wooden seat she helped restore long since rotted or removed. She remembers John the carpenter, who taught her about summer as structural beam, about wood that could bear great weight. They had spent an afternoon reading poetry from weathered headstones, lying on tomb-tables in dappled light, talking about flowers and forgiveness. He had let her apply the wood stain to his restored church pew, her first and only act of skilled craftsmanship. For three hours, she had been purely present, purely happy. But memory is unreliable, and the past resists excavation. The poem she remembers finding carved in old stone—something about a tree that joins sky to earth, about shy music in leaves and air—exists still, but when she photographs it, the words disappear into blur. The technology that promised to preserve everything preserves nothing. The stone holds its secrets. Walking back through a landscape bristling with double fences and SA4A security warnings, Grace realizes the England she knew is gone. Immigration detention centers rise like medieval fortresses. Brexit has carved the country into territories of belonging and exile. Even her own children inhabit different nations—Sacha in the country of climate grief, Robert in the kingdom of historical cruelty. At the hotel, her children wait with barely concealed impatience. Robert has spent their mother's absence researching Einstein's time in Norfolk, that month in 1933 when the greatest mind of the century hid in a gamekeeper's hut while Nazis printed "Not Yet Hanged" beneath his photograph. Even genius, it seems, must sometimes run and hide. Even summer, for all its structural strength, cannot hold forever.

Chapter 5: Separated Friends: Art and Charlotte in Isolation

The phone call cuts through Charlotte's self-imposed darkness like sunlight through prison walls. Art, four hundred miles away with his new love, wants to establish daily contact, artistic communion, shared witness to their separate lockdowns. But Charlotte has abandoned the internet, retreated to a James Bond phone from 2008, chosen disconnection as her rebellion against a world of endless surveillance. In Cornwall, she shares a vast empty house with Art's aunt Iris, a veteran activist who sees pandemic isolation as luxury compared to the constant emergency most humans face. Iris fills the house with released detainees, men who were locked away for the crime of seeking safety. She removes locks from doors, converts bedrooms to dormitories, transforms the septic system to handle the increased load of human waste and hope. Charlotte remains barricaded in a single room, paralyzed by the gap between her revolutionary self-image and her actual powerlessness. She had thought herself an activist, a creator, a force for change. Now she sees herself clearly: a dilettante whose greatest intellectual achievement was analyzing Gilbert O'Sullivan's schoolboy costume choices in 1970s pop culture. While Iris houses refugees and organizes resistance, Charlotte hides behind a door blocked with furniture. Art calls with stories of pigeons carrying unwieldy twigs, metaphors of persistence and nest-building that sound hollow against Charlotte's despair. She wants to tell him about the photographs she found online—empty streets that looked like film sets, lockdown Paris dressed as occupied Paris, the present wearing the past's clothes. But her phone swallows the words, returns them to silence. Finally, she emerges. Not into heroism, but into simple presence. She finds Iris in the garden, surrounded by refugees tending roses. The old woman greets her without judgment, hands her soup, assigns her small tasks. Revolution, Charlotte learns, sometimes means just being present, just adding your hands to the work, just choosing connection over isolation.

Chapter 6: Letters to Hero: Swifts Across Borders

Sacha Greenlaw writes letters to a stranger across the fortified distance between her seaside town and the immigration detention center that rises like a concrete mountain beside the airport. Hero is a microbiologist from Vietnam, held for three years for the crime of seeking asylum. His window is opaque plastic, unopenable. He has taught himself English from a pocket dictionary and dreams of birds he cannot see. In her letters, Sacha becomes a teacher, a sister, a bridge across the artificial distances that politics creates between human hearts. She writes about swifts—those arrow-shaped miracles that spend most of their lives airborne, that sleep on the wing, that navigate by magnetism across continents without ever touching ground. Each swift, she tells him, carries summer in its bones, traveling twelve thousand miles to bring the season home. The letters become a form of prayer, a way of making human connection in inhuman times. Sacha describes the swifts' arrival with the urgency of good news, their departure with the sadness of summer's end. She explains their feeding habits, their nesting behaviors, their impossible journeys. Through her words, Hero learns to read the sky even through his plastic window. When the pandemic empties the detention center, Hero disappears into the night with fifteen other released men. No money, no housing, no legal status—just freedom and fear in equal measure. But Charlotte and Iris find them at the airport, sleeping on departure lounge chairs. They bring coffee trucks and kindness, transform the Cornish house into a sanctuary where former prisoners tend gardens and learn that safety can exist. Hero's reply, when it finally reaches Sacha, carries gratitude across the electronic distance. He has seen the swifts she promised, arrow-shapes against the British sky. In careful English, he signs himself her brother, proving that family is made not of blood alone but of attention, of care, of choosing to see each other's humanity across whatever walls the world builds.

Chapter 7: Summer's Awakening: Finding Light in Dark Times

The violin arrives like a message from the future, impossibly small, child-sized, nestled in its miniature case. Robert Greenlaw has sent it to Daniel Gluck with a note signed "your sister"—the boy still carrying the memory of that moment when the ancient man mistook him for Hannah, still honoring the connection across a century of separation. The instrument delights Daniel, who holds it beside his pillow like a talisman against forgetting. In the hotel restaurant, three generations of the Greenlaw family eat together while Charlotte watches the strange alchemy of understanding develop between the brilliant, damaged boy and the woman who has chosen to see past his cruelty to his intelligence. Robert explains Einstein's theory about particles that remain connected across any distance, how changing one instantly changes its partner. Love, he suggests without using the word, works the same way. Grace watches her son transform under Charlotte's attention, remembers her own transformation under kindness decades ago. In the Suffolk churchyard, among graves she couldn't quite recognize, she had touched something eternal—the way attention can resurrect beauty, the way human connection can bridge any distance. The poem she photographed badly still exists in stone, still promises that trees join sky to earth, that music moves through leaves and air. Arthur delivers his mother's stone to Daniel, completing a circle of memory and gift-giving that none of them fully understands. The stone finds its place beside Barbara Hepworth's sculpture, two rounded forms in conversation across the decades. Daniel's neighbor Elisabeth appears in Arthur's life like recognition itself, proof that even in age and isolation, new love can bloom with shocking suddenness. As the group prepares to return to their separate lives, they carry with them the knowledge that time is neither linear nor final. Hannah's resistance work echoes in Sacha's climate activism. Daniel's internment connects to Hero's detention. The swifts that navigate by magnetism prove that creatures can carry messages across any distance, can find home even in foreign skies.

Summary

Summer ends, but its meanings persist. In the greenhouse of memory, in the bunker of history, human connection survives every attempt to fragment it. The hourglass that Robert glued to Sacha's hand becomes a symbol of time's paradox—fragile as glass, enduring as love, always flowing between past and future, always present in the space between heartbeats. The letters stop, but the swifts continue their migrations. Hero tends his English garden while Sacha watches the sky for arrow-shaped messengers. Charlotte emerges from isolation to join Iris in the work of sheltering strangers. Grace finds peace not in memory's perfect preservation but in its living transformation. And somewhere in a Suffolk room, Daniel Gluck holds a child's violin and hears the music that connects all times, all places, all hearts willing to recognize each other across whatever distances the world insists must divide them.

About Author

Loading

Ali Smith

Smith delves into the complexities of human experience through her innovative and experimental narrative style, offering readers a lens into the fluid nature of identity, time, and socio-political issues. Her work is characterized by playful language and a keen engagement with both contemporary culture and history. This approach allows her to transcend temporality while simultaneously grounding her stories in the human condition. Her themes often emphasize resilience and humanity in the face of adversity, as seen in her acclaimed works such as "How to Be Both", which won multiple prestigious awards, including the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award.\n\nReaders benefit from Smith's writing as it challenges conventional storytelling, inviting them to reconsider their perceptions of reality and history. Her narratives, while rooted in the present, evoke timelessness and universal truths, making them relevant to diverse audiences. Her early book, "Free Love and Other Stories", established her reputation for crafting insightful and thought-provoking literature, setting the stage for her continued exploration of complex themes.\n\nIn addition to her literary achievements, Smith's influence extends beyond her books. Recognized with honors such as the CBE and multiple award nominations, her contributions to literature and society are significant. Her commitment to social causes, alongside her literary work, enriches her bio and highlights her as a prominent figure in contemporary literature.

Read more