(Part I was here, ICYMI.) Cooler days here as we say a drawn-out farewell to summer and welcome in early autumn; I’ve been seeing ripe blackberries and Vs of geese for a few weeks now. This batch of books I read from the library truly encapsulated summer: swifts flying overhead, cold lemonade as a reward for sticky outdoor activities, and travels through the confusing cities and inviting countryside of the Continent.

One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth by Mark Cocker (2023)

We saw our last swift in Newbury somewhere around 13 August. The three and a half months they were with us passed in what felt like an instant, leaving us bereft until they come back.

Why is it that books seem to bunch together by topic, with several about Henry James or swifts or whatever all being published within the same year or few years? It’s unfortunate for Mark Cocker, a well-respected author on birds and environmental issues in general, that he is two years behind Charles Foster and Sarah Gibson with this work on swifts. I also think he attempts too much, in terms of both literary strategy and subject matter (see the second part of the subtitle), and so loses focus.

The book employs a circadian structure, recording what he sees from his garden from one midsummer evening to the next as he looks up at the sky. Within this framework he delivers a lot of information about the world’s swift species, a fair bit of it familiar to me from those previous books; more novel are his stories of remarkable sightings, like a vagrant white-throated needletail in the Outer Hebrides (it later died in a collision with a wind turbine). But he also tries to set swifts in the context of the grand sweep of evolution. I skipped over these sections, which felt superfluous. With his literary allusions, Cocker is aiming for something like Tim Dee’s exceptional Greenery but falls short.

This could have made a superb concentrated essay, maybe as part of a collection devoting each chapter to a different species, because his passion is clear and his metaphors excellent as he holds up swifts as an emblem of the aerial life, and of hope (“In a social screaming display these weaponised shapes blaze together as a black-swarming meteor in a widening orbit that burns over the houses or between them”). The few-page run-on sentence about how humanity has gotten itself into the climate crisis is pretty great (though Lev Parikian did so much more concisely in Into the Tangled Bank: It’s “f***ing f***ed”). But Foster has written the definitive tribute to swifts, The Screaming Sky, and in just 150 small pages.

Rhubarb Lemonade by Oskar Kroon (2019; 2023)

[Translated from the Swedish by A. A. Prime]

This was like an update of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson: the delicious innocence of a Scandinavian island summer is threatened by change and, ultimately, death. Vinga is happy to escape her troubles for a simple island life with Grandpa. They eat the same foods day after day, do the same things week after week, and slowly work on refurbishing the wooden sailing boat he gave her. Ruth, the shopkeeper’s granddaughter, couldn’t be more different: she hates the sea, misses the city, and is fully immersed in social media and celebrity culture. Yet Vinga finds her captivating and tingles when she’s near. “Things would be so much easier if we’d never met. Things would be so much more boring if we’d never met.”

Prime won Sweden’s August Prize for this YA novel (spot the reference to The Murderer’s Ape, which won the same prize!). As will be familiar to regular readers of YA, we see Vinga dealing with issues like bullying, loneliness, body image, and family breakdown. She’s called back to the mainland to meet the baby her father has had by the new woman in his life – a trip that coincides with the worst storm the island has seen in ages and a chance for Grandpa to play the sea captain hero. But falling for Ruth, kissing a girl, is not a reason for angst. It’s just the way things are. Kroon makes no grand claim that this will be true love, forever. It’s a teen summer romance, and exaggerated by the cover. Maybe it will last; maybe it won’t. The deeper love is familial, particularly between Vinga and her grandfather.

August Blue by Deborah Levy (2023)

My third novel from Levy, and a typically confounding one. The facts are simple enough: Elsa M. Anderson is a pianist who has had something of a breakdown. She retreats from giving concerts, dyes her hair blue, and bounces between European capitals in the later days of the pandemic, giving music lessons and caring for her mentor and adoptive father, Arthur, who’s dying on Sardinia. In between there are laughs and lovers, searching and sadness, all muffled by Elsa’s (Levy’s) matter-of-factness. Meanwhile, there’s a touch of the uncanny in the doppelganger Elsa keeps seeing. First, her double buys the carousel horses she had her eye on in Athens. Then Elsa steals her twin’s trilby hat. There’s a confrontation late on but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. The doubling appears to be a way of making literal the adopted Elsa’s divided self. I’m not entirely sure what to say about this one. I enjoyed reading it well enough. Though I never felt compelled to pick it up, when I did I easily got through several chapters at a time. But I’m not convinced it meant much.

La Vie: A Year in Rural France by John Lewis-Stempel (2023)

Lewis-Stempel’s best book in an age; my favourite, certainly, since Meadowland. I’m featuring it in a summer post because, like Peter Mayle’s Provence series, it’s ideal for armchair travelling. Especially with the heat waves that have swept Europe this summer, I’m much happier reading about France or Italy than being there. The author has written much about his Herefordshire haunts, but he’s now relocated permanently to southwest France (La Roche, in the Charente). He proudly calls himself a peasant farmer, growing what he can and bartering for much of the rest. La Vie chronicles a year in his quest to become self-sufficient. It opens one January and continues through the December, an occasional diary with recipes.

The family’s small-scale potager is organic agriculture at its best. He likens it to turning the clock back to the 1970s, or earlier, before England wrecked its countryside with industrial production. (His list of birds in the area is impressive, including some you’d be lucky to come across in the UK – turtledove, nightingale, stone curlew.) In fact, he estimates that his yield per square metre is triple what it was when he participated in that damaging system, for the same amount of work. His lifestyle is also a deliberate resistance to hyper-speed modernity: he scythes his grass, spends days preserving a haul of walnuts, and tries his hand at pressing oil and making spirits. There’s a make-do-and-mend attitude here: when his sheep-shearing equipment goes missing, he buys a beard trimmer at the supermarket and uses that instead.

It’s a peaceful, comforting read that’s attuned to the seasons and the land. There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language. I could never make a living by manual labour, but I like reading about back-to-the-land adventures, especially ones as bucolic as this – two-hour lunches, six-course dinners with homemade wine? Mais oui!