My thanks to John Murray Press Two Roads for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Year Without Summer’ by Guinevere Glasfurd in exchange for an honest review. It was published on 6 February.

“1816 - one event, six lives, a world changed”

The event actually takes place in 1815 with the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island, Indonesia. This novel weaves together six stories, each exploring the lives of individuals who experience an aspect of this event as its ash cloud blocks the sun and causes the seasons to fail throughout the world.

I felt that in the Author’s Afterword she perfectly summed up her novel: “The year of 1816 was one of flood and fire, of popular protest and revolutionary struggle, of Constable’s art and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A famine year, when protectionist policies were enacted to protect landed wealth and benefit those never at risk from going hungry. It was a year dominated by strikingly similar debates and concerns about national debt, poor relief and protectionism as those that are being had today, both in austerity Britain and in Trump’s America.”

This highlights that the premise of Guinevere Glasfurd’s historical fiction is very relevant to our current situation given that the effects of the global climate change emergency is in the news daily. I found this message came across very clearly. It is a sober novel with some heartbreaking scenes though remains very readable.

The movement between the six stories made it feel at times a little bitty, yet overall I felt that her writing wove an intricate portrait of her subjects and the period setting. It was clear that she had done a great deal of research and was able to translate that into powerful yet lyrical prose.

On a side note it is mentioned in the Mary Shelley section that the publisher of Lord Byron was John Murray, a reminder of how long this publisher has been established.

I was completely captivated by this story.I learned about the Tambora explosion the effect it had on the climate and the lives of the characters.Mixing in Mary Shelley and the world that changed for them really engaged my imagination. A book I will be highly recommending.#netgalley#johnmurray

This is one of the most enthralling book I read this year and the mix of historical facts and fiction makes it even more interesting.
The author is a talented storyteller and I was sad when I turned the last page.
Everything is well done and I want to read more by this author.
Strongly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I have to admit, I didn’t understand The Year Without Summer until I read the Afterword, when some of the meaning became clear. As I read, I was waiting for the individual stories to link up in some way, although I couldn’t see how Mary Shelley, staying in France, could have any connection with John Constable, mourning the death of his father in Essex, let alone with a starving farm worker, a returning soldier who’s family home has been destroyed, and a minister in Vermont, America, I found the flitting between these disparate characters, leading lives so far removed from each other, was quite confusing and struggled to finish the book.

The actual historical content was interesting, and the story of the consequences of the eruption is obviously a serious one, but this wasn’t a book for me,

The Year Without Summer explores the impact of the devastating earthquake that took place on the Indonesian island of Tambora in 1815, an event that affected the weather as far away as Europe and North America.

Ranging across a variety of locations, the novel follows the fortunes of Henry, the surgeon on a ship dispatched to investigate the event; the painter, John Constable as he travels between London and Suffolk, struggling to make enough money to get married; the writer, Mary Shelley in Italy in the company of her husband, sister and Lord Byron as she begins writing Frankenstein; Charles, a preacher in Vermont urging his followers to put their faith in the Lord; Peter, a disillusioned soldier returning to Essex from the Napoleonic War; and Sarah, an impoverished agricultural labourer looking for work in rural Suffolk. All their lives are affected by the poor harvests and the hike in the cost of grain that is a consequence of the eruption.

Guinevere Glusford does a very good job of holding together this web of plotlines but it's a lot of characters and I would have liked to have heard more of their lives. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating story with considerable significance for the modern reader, given the fragility of our own climate .

This book taught me a lot about the Summer of 1815, and the catastrophic consequences of a huge volcanic eruption. The separate stories are each about the different ways lives are affected, but there is no further crossover between the characters from each one. The use of completely fictional characters alongside real ones works well. It was a fascinating read, and I strongly recommend it.

This is a well-written book, but sometimes it felt like a textbook and I had difficulty to keep going. Overall I liked the characters the theme and how climate change was integrated. But, I wanted it to be more smooth in its flaw.
Overall, I enjoyed my time.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Two years ago I read Guinevere Glasfurd’s first novel, The Words in My Hand, about a young Dutch woman and her relationship with the philosopher René Descartes. I loved that book so was hoping for a similar experience with her new one, The Year Without Summer. However, although I loved parts of this book too, I found it entirely different from The Words in My Hand and less enjoyable as a whole.

The title refers to the year 1816, which was the year following the eruption of Mount Tambora, an Indonesian volcano. It was known as ‘the year without a summer’ due to the effects of the volcanic activity on the weather. These effects were felt all over the world, far away from Asia: in Europe, low temperatures and heavy rain caused flooding, failed harvests and famine, while crops were also destroyed in North America by droughts and by frost and snow in June. In The Year Without Summer, Glasfurd explores, in fictional form, the stories of six different people whose lives were affected by the extreme weather.

The first character we meet is Henry Hogg, ship’s surgeon aboard the Benares, who sets sail in April 1815 for the island of Sumbawa to investigate reports of explosions and is shocked by what he finds: ash falling from the sky, the sea turning to stone and what had once been a green island now ‘a hellish scene’. Henry’s story is the only one in the book that takes us directly to the scene of the eruption – the others only mention the volcano briefly, if at all – yet, surprisingly, his is the one given the least time and attention.

The following spring, the English landscape painter, John Constable, is returning home to Suffolk from an unsuccessful visit to London in an attempt to gain recognition for his art and be admitted to the Royal Academy. Without that recognition and the money it would bring, John’s future looks bleak: how can he expect his beloved Maria to marry a struggling artist with no prospects?

The future of our third protagonist, Sarah Hobbs, looks even more uncertain. She and her friend Tessie are walking across the Fens from farm to farm looking for work, only to be told that there is no work to be had – and even if there was, the wages would only be half of what they were the year before. Meanwhile, Hope Peter, a soldier back from Waterloo, is having problems of his own. In his absence, his mother has died and his family home has been demolished; the life to which he’d thought he was returning no longer exists.

In the May of that year, Mary Godwin travels to Switzerland with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their baby son Willmouse, and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. They are planning to spend the summer at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and his doctor, John Polidori, but the gloomy weather keeps them indoors where they entertain themselves by writing horror stories. Finally, we meet Charles Whitlock, a preacher from Vermont, who gives us an American perspective on the summer of 1816. Charles is trying to gain the trust of his flock who are growing increasingly worried about the lack of rain and planning to abandon their farms to head west to Ohio.

These six very different storylines alternate throughout the book, never meeting or intersecting in any way, the only link between them being the unusual weather of 1816. They cover a range of issues including the social unrest which led to the Littleport Riots, the enclosure of land in the English countryside, the writing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the influence of the weather on John Constable’s paintings, and I found something to interest me in all of the stories – although most of them are very bleak and it would have been nice to have had a few more happy endings!

My problem with the book was that the way it was structured, with a chapter from one story, then a chapter from another, made it feel disjointed and made it difficult to stay engaged with each set of characters. As the six threads never came together at all, I think I would have preferred just a straightforward collection of six complete short stories – or maybe even just four, as the ones following the ship’s surgeon and the Vermont preacher felt very slight and undeveloped in comparison to the others.

As a whole, I don’t think this book was entirely successful, but still with more positives than negatives. It’s impossible not to draw parallels between the weather of 1816 and some of the extreme weather the world has been experiencing recently, which we can only expect to see more of in the future due to climate change, so this was a relevant read as well as an interesting one.

The attraction of this book also turned out to be its flaw. I liked the idea of multiple narratives documenting how various lives were thrown into upheaval by a volcanic eruption. Unfortunately in the end, this feels like six novellas stitched together with no real connective tissue in exactly the same way that, say, Cloud Atlas doesn't. That aside, each story on its own is decent. Glasfurd has a good knack for conveying a setting, and for writing in distinctive voices. My one favourite, aged radical that I am, was Sarah's story with its peasants' uprising. I'd happily have read a whole novel just on that. Worth a read, but won't be troubling my books of the list come December.

This is a description of the turmoil across the world following the Tambora eruption of April 1815, the story of the upheaval being shown through the lives of a number of individuals in different settings. The immense eruption was recognised as the trigger for a period of sudden cooling across the Northern Hemisphere. This rapid change brought about crop failure, leading to extensive famine, prices rises for basic foods and, ultimately, social unrest which became the trigger for the social and political reform of the nineteenth century.

Each character is drawn from a know individual of the time, some very directly, John Constable and Mary Shelley are instantly recognisable and their work of the time is well known, while others are drawn from less detailed records of the time, involving individuals who were protesting against the enclosure of common land and the impact this had on the poorest people being able to farm at a subsistence level. The class conflicts led to the reading of the Riot Act, harsh responses from the landed and commercial classes, and extreme punishments for known participants in the unrest are all depicted here. As well as this we see the record of the ship's doctor aboard the first Western vessel to reach the stricken area near the volcanic eruption and read about the struggles of the farmers in the young United States of America.

There is such an interesting parallel to be drawn between the initial, little understood catastrophe and the international outcomes and the current situation of Climate Emergency with all the unknown consequences which seem to lie ahead for all of us. A really interesting and worthwhile read.

This story charts the global effect of the Tambora volcano eruption and the unusual weather that followed in 1815. We learn how there was flooding, drought crop failures, famine, cholera, thypoid and social unrest.

I knew nothing about the year without summer before reading this book. A long the cast of characters we have Mary Shelly and John Constable. Some stories are told in the third person, others in the first. This is actually six stories of individuals who are connected only by the event and they are scattered all over the world. This was quite an interesting read.

I would like to thank Netgalley John Murray Press and the author Guinevere Glasfurd for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A very interesting premise: how a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world can impact 6 different characters; showing the interconnectivity, the globality of the world at a time when most people were very locally focused. A very strong start that immediately draw me in. Such lyrical and suggestive writing style. Particularly skillful how the author manages to create 6 original and so different voices. Different not only in circumstances and experiences but so different in language and accents(if you like, even if I guess you can argue it's almost impossible to transcribe accents). But... along the way I've just lost interest. There are some very tragic events that truly touched me, but even so, it was not enough to keep me interested. I've finished the book because I had to, and I really couldn't care about this characters' resolutions. A shame, really!

What a fascinating story and what a great idea to treat it this way. The great volcanic explosion that led to the year without summer was so destructive and widespread and devastating too. The characters tried to just live their lives not knowing of the catastrophic eruption. Mary Shelley, John Constable, all of them are beautifully protrayed - I was gripped from beginning to the end of this wonderful book. Everyone should read it.

At first I thought it was an ingenious idea to provide a catastrophic event in history as the setting for the totally independent retelling of various people's accounts from that time. However, the concept worked better for me than the actual novel as I couldn't successfully make that jump from one set of characters to another, as required by Glasfurd. I was left feeling this was a set of short stories that were consistently and annoyingly being interrupted - a shame as each was quite fascinating and made very enjoyable reading.
Perhaps those readers looking for a more unusual approach to writing may really find this works for them.

Thank you to Two Roads (John Murray Press) and NetGalley for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

I was very excited about reading this book but was left disappointed. It charts the global effect of the Tambora volcano eruption. Focusing on 6 people's lives, it is messy and slightly confusing. I didn't engage readily with many (and there were many) characters. It did help that John Constable and the Shelleys were characters to put this onto context, but it was hard work to read.
Thank you to Netgalley for giving me a digital version of this book in exchange for an unbiased review

This is a very well written book but I struggled in parts to keep reading. It is a topical read as the effects of climate change are discussed so much at present.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This is incredibly hard-going. It has far too many characters who are one-dimensional with little depth, and dodges between them far too often, making it difficult to follow. The book is supposedly the story of how a volcano affects the whole world and various people in it. However the volcano appears briefly on few occasions and is easily forgotten as the purpose of the whole story. It would be better to read the Afterword and dispense with the rest, there it describes succinctly and clearly the whole disaster and the people involved. That alone was interesting and held my interest.
I would not recommend and would certainly not read any other books by this author.

I didn't love this one I'm afraid. The fact that there was no link at all between the 6 different stories meant that you never grew to care for the characters. Maybe I hadn't read the blurb properly but I also expected it to be more about the volcanic explosion - there was barely anything about what happened on the ship.

It was all so very depressing as well - there could have been redemption or an element of positivity for at least one of the characters at the end, but no, it was all very dark.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC.

I found this book very interesting as I hadn't known about the confluence of events resulting from the Tambora eruption, and Glasfurd does a good job of moving between the different characters. However, I felt that there were too many stories for any one to land a proper emotional punch - in fact I would have preferred to have less of the Mary Shelley/John Constable stories and more about the working class struggle.

This is an unusual and interesting book; it builds a set of parallel stories around one major cataclysmic event in what was then the Dutch East Indies in 1815, when the Mount Tambora volcano erupted, and weaves around this event episodes in the life of some well-known and some invented but representative characters whose lives were in some way impacted by this event. The description of the scenes of devastation witnessed by the first European witnesses to the aftermath of the eruption are uncannily similar to the scenes of recent volcanic eruptions brought to us by 24 hour news coverage. The description of these harrowing scenes in the book is lifted from witnesses’ accounts from the East India Company ship Benares and is somehow more graphic than modern TV coverage.

In another nod to current issues, the eruption had significant effects on the climate across the planet - hence the title. The stories of the additional characters in Europe and America illustrate both aspects of these malign effects and - possibly even more powerfully - the difficulties encountered by ordinary people in early nineteenth century society. Whether the author’s choice to reflect modern TV practice in jumping repeatedly from character to character adds to the fluency of the narrative is - in this reader’s opinion at least - an unresolved question. Notwithstanding that reservation this is an absorbing read and is strongly recommended.