A historic read though I am uncertain as to how true to history it is.
I did enjoy the book and found the romance enjoyable.

Thanks to Netgalley and John Murray publishers for the Advance Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I'm sorry this wasn't my cup of tea. I really wanted it to be.
A great premise though, and definitely a warning to us all about climate change and its far-reaching effects.

‘Never had there been such a bad year as this.’

In 1815, Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island (then part of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia) exploded. This powerful volcanic eruption killed thousands immediately, led to the starvation of thousands more, and had a massive impact on the world’s climate in 1816. The Year Without Summer, as 1816 came to be known, caused famine resulting in poverty and riots. Snow fell in the northern hemisphere in August.

‘It was the end of times; he knew of no other reason for it.’

In this novel, Ms Glasfurd imagines the impact of The Year Without Summer through the lives of six different people. The six people include a Fenland farm labourer, a preacher in Vermont, a doctor on a ship, a war veteran, as well as the author Mary Shelley and the painter John Constable.

None of these stories are related, each serves to highlight the impact of The Year Without Summer. John Constable’s painting was influenced by changes to light, Mary Shelley struggled to find a story to write. The Vermont preacher persuades people not to move and has to live with the consequences. The ship’s doctor describes what he sees in the ocean off the Dutch East Indies, and how helpless he is. The war veteran and the Fenland farm labourer are both caught up in riots as crops fail, wages fall, and producers seek to mechanise labour-intensive work.

‘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.’

As I read this novel, in Australia in January 2020, I am surrounded by fires. Some of those fires have resulted from weather caused by existing fires. In the north, there has been some flooding, close by a massive hailstorm. The impact of climatic events is all too real. I found this novel difficult to put down. While the six stories are not interrelated, they don’t need to be. One purpose of the narrative is to imagine the widespread impact of such a climate disaster.

Unsettling. Highly recommended. I just wish I could confine it all to fiction.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Australia for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

The Year Without Summer is a historical novel which narrates a year in the lives of six characters, two of them most likely already known to the audience: Mary Shelley and John Constable. All the six stories are independent from each other, but share a common ground: they're all set in the aftermath of the eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 in Indonesia and that explains also the title of the novel, as 1816 will be known as "the year without summer". As the reader learns in the afterword, that volcanic eruption was so destructive that it triggered huge climatic effects worldwide: a drop in the temperature, huge floods in Europe, and drought in North America. Through the different stories we read how climatic changes had dramatic social impacts, particularly for the poorests classes and, in the case of Mary Shelley, contributed to the genesis of her most famous novel, Frankenstein.

Among all the stories, I found the ones of Mary and Sarah the most interesting to me, but all of them add a detail, a new aspect about what was going now then that help us getting the whole picture. The biggest theme of the novel is without doubts the impacts of climate on our lives, a message that comes as an additional warning to what we are facing now and in our future.
Even if the novel is sometimes heavy with a sense of gloom (those were really difficult times) to me it was a pleasant read. I'd recommend it if you're interested in historical novels, especially when set in the XIX century.

Thanks to Hachette Australia and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this novel.