Summer Reads, Part I: Buti, Ellis, C. Foster (Reread), Itami, Thomson
The less said about the summer of 2026, the better. It feels like the heat wave will never end. We’ve had 4 mm of rain the whole month. Drought imperils so much. But it’s not right to complain when wildfires rage not so far away. One glance at the news headlines and there’s no avoiding the signs of climate breakdown everywhere. I can’t bear it. I just keep reading.
Year of the Drought by Roland Buti (2015; 2017)
[Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell]
How exhausting was that summer of 1976, always beating down on our heads!
This Swiss novella takes place during the infamous European heat wave that people still talk about half a century later. It’s a perfect febrile setting for 13-year-old Gus’s coming-of-age, which includes a sexual awakening and the dawning realisation that his parents aren’t perfect; that in fact his family is falling apart. The Sutters’ operations embody the move from family smallholding to an industrial model. They keep a small number of cattle but are also experimenting with large-scale henhouses holding thousands of birds. In contrast with that vast flock, about whose welfare the characters seem indifferent, is an injured white dove that Gus finds and keeps as a pet. (A wise choice by Buti: it’s easier to feel compassion for an individual, such as the dove or the old farm horse, Bagatelle, than for a faceless mass.) Helping Gus and his father on the farm is distant cousin Rudy, who has Down’s syndrome; disrupting their routines is Cécile, Gus’s mother’s friend, who has come to stay with them.
Because of the drought, our minds were full of dreams of coolness and moisture
Dreams of rain, dreams of love, dreams of preserving some mythical family happiness that maybe never existed. Like the weather, everything goes wrong – in tragic ways. It’s all so awful I recoiled. Buti jumps ahead several decades to offer a longer view of the land, but I couldn’t ignore how casually the teenage Gus adopted his father’s violent, misogynistic ways. None of what happens bodes well for the future. The one laugh I got out of the experience was the charity shop accidentally labelling the book “Romance fiction.” (Secondhand – BHF, Newbury) 
Book 1 of The Summerhouse Trilogy
The Clothes in the Wardrobe by Alice Thomas Ellis (1987)
I hadn’t had great luck with Ellis, fiction and nonfiction, before, but I’m so glad I was tempted by this omnibus edition and tried her again. This melancholy, introspective novella was right up my street. Margaret’s yearning for her Egyptian upbringing isn’t the only reason I reached for Moon Tiger as a readalike; Ellis’s tone reminded me of Barbara Comyns and Penelope Lively for its mix of cynicism and nostalgia. Margaret is soon to marry Sylvester, though she doesn’t love him at all and he’s closer to her mother’s age as well as a known womanizer. Perhaps the engagement was her mother’s idea more than her own? The title is an apt symbol for living to someone else’s expectations: “my life fitted me as ill as a garment designed for somebody else,” Margaret thinks. It’s no coincidence that she’s to be married in her mother’s old wedding dress. There are also sartorial metaphors around memory (“Did the elderly have minds like old wardrobes stuffed to overflowing…”) and resistance to ageing. I marked out so many shrewd observations and witty conversations. I empathized with Margaret’s feeling of being trapped in a life she hasn’t chosen.
It seems like one of those books where nothing will happen, but there’s actually a surprise ending that looks set to move Margaret onto a different track. As I understand it, the other two volumes repeat the weeks leading up to the wedding from other perspectives: Margaret’s staid mother-in-law-to-be; and her mother’s bohemian friend Lili, who was her bridesmaid back in Egypt and arrives in time to shake things up. I love that premise. The omnibus cover seems random, but the question of whether the cactus in the summerhouse will flower as good luck for the wedding becomes an important plot point. I’ll jump right into Book 2. (Secondhand – Regent Books, Wantage) 
The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster (2021)
The only thing that has redeemed these dry, scorching days is the swifts screeching across the sky. How can it be that I was once unaware of them? How is it possible for people not to look up for these noisy acrobats whenever they’re outdoors? Somehow, I was oblivious until maybe 10–15 years ago. Now, I always have at least one eye on the sky during these crucial few months. And although this year swifts have been with me since early April (first in Portugal and then in our neighbourhood), I’m already dreading their departure for Africa in a few weeks. They’re still here! I trill to myself each morning. But soon that won’t be true. And with populations in freefall, there may come a day when they don’t return to the UK at all.
Charles Foster is a kindred spirit who sets similar emotional store by the presence or absence of the common swift (Apus apus). I appreciated this when I first read it five years ago (my review), but all the more so now. The monograph takes us through one year with swifts. In the summer, he needs travel no further than his own street in Oxford, but the rest of the time he has to chase them down in continental Europe and central and southern Africa. It’s an old-fashioned quest, a romantic pursuit, a hopeless attempt to keep hold of creatures as fast and elusive as the wind. Foster salts his narrative with all the salient facts but acknowledges that, for all we claim to know about them, these birds retain an essential magic and mystery. “Their power, freedom and joy are the way that everything really is – though we don’t usually see it. It is just that when the swifts scream through the sky, you can’t miss it. That’s how everything, all the time, is meant to be.” (Review copy from Little Toller Books)
My original rating:
My rating now: 
Bonus content:
From Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds (illus. Jackie Morris):
From the Spell Songs album Let the Light In: “Swifts”
& My current earworm, also featuring Kris Drever: a more general reassurance – or at least philosophical acceptance – that change is the one constant in life, in perfect pop song form (“Change”)
And from Ugandan poet Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians: “in the first part of the night, I saw the coastal villages, men arguing / about the price of oil and swifts darting into shadows.” (from “Codex© of Birds”)
Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (2025)
Itami was shortlisted for a Costa Award for her enjoyable 2021 debut, Fault Lines. Kakigori is a flavoured shaved-ice dessert and it’s a great choice of title for this bittersweet – but mostly sweet – story of three sisters raised between Tokyo and London who reunite in Japan to spend a summer together with their prickly great-grandmother, Obaachan, who’s nearing 100. Narration alternates between Rei, the oldest, who has a high-flying finance job and keeps everyone in line; Kiki, who’s a single mother and works in a care home for the elderly; and Ai, a flighty pop star now in disgrace for her affair with a married man. Although there is much joy in their banter, little Hikaru’s antics, and the pursuit of the finest culinary treats, a shadow over it all is their mother’s unexplained death. She went for a swim one day when they were girls and never came back, nor was a body ever found; they have to suspect suicide. (“Well, that’s that, then. Nothing will be all right ever again.”) This easy-reading novel affirms the goodness of life despite the reality of death. Its typically Japanese feasts and funerary rites brought to mind Bryan Washington’s similarly well-balanced Memorial. My only note would be that I’m not sure the voices were distinctive enough to warrant three first-person narrators; third person rotating would probably have done the job. (Public library)
Saltwater: A Midsummer Ghost Story by Elaine Thomson (2026)
“The dead are closer than we think.”
I hadn’t heard of the Scottish island of Stroma, so assumed it was made up. In fact, it’s real, lying between Orkney and the north coast of Caithness on mainland Scotland, but uninhabited as of 1962. Tom Torrance travels by train and boat from Edinburgh a few days before midsummer to oversee the last steps in the construction of the island’s lighthouse and meet with Mr Stevenson (of the famous lighthouse-building clan, which included novelist Robert Louis Stevenson). With him is his brother Jamie; he’s not of much practical help, but they cling to each other because they lost their mother to tuberculosis a week ago. The travelling minister Tom meets on the train gives him a rowan-wood amulet and cautions him that midsummer is a liminal time when the spirit world is close at hand. Tom doesn’t heed the warning. He arrives to find a disaster-prone construction project that has entailed serious injuries and broken machinery. Flora Christie and her grandmother, Thrawn Jean, are local women with healing powers who are treated with suspicion: women, especially those with red hair, are considered bad luck around boats. The men want to seal a “witch bottle” into the wall for good luck. He dismisses their superstitions but at the same time keeps seeing hallucinations of the dead in the waves and on the in-construction edifice. Is it grief, Flora’s special whisky, or a real taste of the supernatural?
This was highly reminiscent of Michelle Paver’s work. The typical Victorian-pastiche ghost story bores me because it’s always just the same: the narrator is a dignified gentleman who can’t possibly be seeing such things, yet documents them and his own horror with great precision. Thomson set herself an interesting challenge, writing a quartet of Scottish ghost stories set at turning points of the year. (This is the second, after Hawthorn.) I probably won’t try the others unless my library acquires them. (Public library) 
Three on a Theme: English Gardeners (Bradbury, Laing and Mabey)
These three 2024 releases share a passion for gardening – but not the old-fashioned model of bending nature to one’s will to create aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Instead, the authors are also concerned with sustainability and want to do the right thing in a time of climate crisis (all three mention the 2022 drought, which saw the first 40 °C day being recorded in the UK). They seek to strike a balance between human interference and letting a site go wild, and they are cognizant of the wider political implications of having a plot of land of one’s own. All three were borrowed from the public library. #LoveYourLibrary
One Garden against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate by Kate Bradbury
Bradbury is Wildlife Editor of BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine and makes television appearances in the UK. She’s owned her suburban Brighton home for four years and has tried to turn its front and back gardens into havens, however small, for wildlife. The book covers April 2022 to June 2023, spotlighting the drought summer. “It’s about a little garden in south Portslade and one terrified, angry gardener.” Month by month, present-tense chapters form not quite a diary, but a record of what she’s planting, pruning, relocating, and so on. There is also a species profile at the end of each chapter, usually of an insect (as in the latest Dave Goulson book) – she’s especially concerned that she’s seeing fewer, yet she’s worried for local birds, trees and hedgehogs, too.
Often, she takes matters into her own hands. She plucks caterpillars from vegetation in the path of strimmers in the park and raises them at home; protects her garden’s robins from predators and provides enough food so they can nest and raise five fledglings; undertakes to figure out where her pond’s amphibians have come from; rescues hedgehogs; and bravely writes to neighbours who have scaffolding up (for roof repairs, etc.) beseeching them to put up swift boxes while they’re at it. Sometimes it works: a pub being refurbished by new owners happily puts up sparrow boxes when she tells them the birds have always nested in crevices in the building. Sometimes it doesn’t; people ignore her letters and she can’t seem to help but take it personally.
For individuals, it’s all too easy to be overtaken by anxiety, helplessness and despair, and Bradbury acknowledges that collective action and solidarity are vital. “I am reminded, once again, that it’s the community that will save these trees, not me. I’m reminded that community is everything.” She bands together with other environmentally minded people to resist a local development, educate the public about hedgehogs through talks, and oppose “Drone Bastard,” who flies drones at seagulls nesting on rooftops (not strictly illegal; disappointingly, their complaint doesn’t get anywhere with the police, RSPB or RSPCA).
Along the way, there are a few insights into the author’s personal life. She lives with her partner Emma and dog Tosca and accesses wild walks even right on the edge of a city in the Downs. Separate visits to her divorced parents are chances for more nature spotting – in Suffolk to see her father, she hears her first curlew and lapwings – but also involve some sadness, as her mother has aphasia and fatigue after a stroke.
Nearly every day of the chronology seems to bring more bad news for nature. “It’s hard, sometimes,” she admits, “trying to enjoy natural, wonderful events, trying to keep the clawing sense of unease at bay”. She is staunch in her fond stance: “I will love it, with all my heart, whatever has managed to remain, whatever is left.” And she models through her own amazingly biodiverse garden the ways we can extend refuge to other creatures if we throw out that pointless notion of ‘tidiness.’ “The UK’s 30 million gardens represent 30 million opportunities to create green spaces that hold on to water and carbon, create shade, grow food and provide habitats for wildlife that might otherwise not survive.” Reading this made me feel less guilty about the feral tangle of buddleia, ragwort, hemp agrimony and bindweed overtaking the parts of our back garden that aren’t given over to meadow, pond and hedge. Every time I venture back there I see tons of insects and spiders, and that’s all that matters.
My main critique is that one year would have been adequate, cutting the book to 250 pages rather than 300 and ensuring less repetition while still being a representative time period. But Bradbury is impressive for her vigilance and resolve. Some might say that she takes herself and life too seriously, but it’s really more that she’s aware of the scale of destruction already experienced and realistic about what we stand to lose. 
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
I consider Laing one of our most important public thinkers. I saw her introduce the book via the online Edinburgh Book Festival event “In Search of Eden,” in which she appeared on screen and was interviewed by JC Niala. Laing explained that this is not a totally new topic for her as she has been involved in environmental activism and in herbalism. But in 2020, when she and her much older husband bought a house in Suffolk – the first home she has owned after a life of renting – she started restoring its walled garden, which had been created in the 1960s by Mark Rumary. For a year, she watched and waited to see what would happen in the garden, only removing obvious weeds. This coincided with lockdown, so visits to gardens and archives were limited; she focused more on the creation of her own garden and travelling through literature. A two-year diary resulted, in seven notebooks.
Niala observed that the structure of the book, with interludes set in the Suffolk garden, means that the reader has a place to come back to between the deep dives into history. Why make a garden? she asked Laing. Beauty, pleasure, activity: these would be pat answers, Laing insisted. Instead, as with all her books, the reason is the impulse to make complicated structures. Repetitive tasks can be soothing; “the drudgery can be compelling as well.”
Laing spoke of a garden as both refuge and resistance, a mix of wild and cultivated. In this context, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden was a “wellspring of inspiration” for her, “a riposte to a toxic atmosphere” of nuclear power and the AIDS crisis (Rumary, like Jarman, was gay). It’s hard to tell where the beach ends and his garden begins, she noted, and she tried to make her garden similarly porous by kicking a hole in the door so frogs could get in. She hopes it will be both vulnerable and robust, a biodiversity hotspot. With Niala, she discussed the idea of a garden as a return to innocence. We have a “tarnished Eden” due to climate change, and we have to do what we can to reverse that.
The event was brilliant – just the level of detail I wanted, with Laing flitting between subjects and issuing amazingly intelligent soundbites. The book, though, seemed like page after page about Milton (Paradise Lost) and Iris Origo or the Italian Renaissance. I liked it best when it stayed personal to her family and garden project. There are incredible lyric passages, but just stringing together floral species’ names – though they’re lovely and almost incantatory – isn’t art; it also shuts out those of us who don’t know plants, who aren’t natural gardeners. I wasn’t about to Google every plant I didn’t know (though I did for a few). Also, I have read a lot about Derek Jarman in particular. So my reaction was admiration rather than full engagement, and I only gave the book a light skim in the end. It is striking, though, how she makes this subject political by drawing in equality of access and the climate crisis. (Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize and the Wainwright Prize.) 
Some memorable lines:
“A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time.”
“A garden is a balancing act, which can take the form of collaboration or outright war. This tension between the world as it is and the world as humans desire it to be is at the heart of the climate crisis, and as such the garden can be a place of rehearsal too, of experimenting with this relationship in new and perhaps less harmful ways.”
“the garden had become a counter to chaos on a personal as well as a political level”
“the more sinister legacy of Eden: the fantasy of perpetual abundance”
The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness and the Space in Between by Richard Mabey
Mabey gives a day-to-day description of a recent year on his two-acre Norfolk property, but also an overview of the past 20 years of change – which of course pretty much always equates to decline. He muses on wildflowers, growing a meadow and hedgerow, bird behaviour, butterfly numbers, and the weather becoming more erratic and extreme. What he sees at home is a reflection of what is going on in the world at large. “It would be glib to suggest that the immeasurably complex problems of a whole world are mirrored in the small confrontations and challenges of the garden. But maybe the mindset needed for both is the same: the generosity to reset the power balance between ourselves and the natural world.” He seeks to create “a fusion garden” of native and immigrant species, trying to intervene as little as possible. The goal is to tend the land responsibly and leave it better off than he found it. As with the Laing, I found many good passages, but overall I felt this was thin – perhaps reflecting his age and loss of mobility – or maybe a swan song. Again, I just skimmed, even though it’s only 160 pages.
Some memorable lines:
“being Earth’s creatures ourselves, we too have a right to a niche. So in our garden we’ve had more modest ambitions, for ‘parallel development’ you might say, and a sense of neighbourliness with our fellow organisms.”
“We feel embattled at times, and that we should try to make some sort of small refuge, a natural oasis.”
“A garden, with its complex interactions between humans and nature, is often seen as a metaphor for the wider world. But if so, is our plot a microcosm of this troubled arena or a refuge from it?”
You might think I would have been more satisfied by Mabey’s contemplative bent, or Laing’s wealth of literary and historical allusions. It turns out that when it comes to gardening, Bradbury’s practical approach was what I was after. But you may gravitate to any of these, depending on whether you want something for the hands, intellect or memory.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 