Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

It takes a special skill to write non-fiction in a way that feels fictional. The year without summer did not achieve this for me. I was really looking forward to this because I'm always interested in where natural disaster and creativity intersect but I feel that this book just missed it slightly.

The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasford is set in 1816 when a volcano erupted and the aftereffects caused world wide weather issues, and this follows six different people.

I liked the idea of this book, but I found that jumping around the different points of view to be a little confusing. It has some famous characters in it, like Mary Shelley, and I found that it assumed some prior knowledge about them and what has happened before the book starts.

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to John Murray Press.

Multiple stories woven together around the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1866. A real event that impacted the whole world.
Well written, engaging and interesting subject for a book!

The premise of this book is excellent, but it just didn't hit right for me. I found the six different stories a bit much and, whilst the explosion of the volcano was supposed to be the thing that bound them together, it just all felt a bit random. There was definitely promise in this story, but it felt like something was missing.

In 1815 in an explosion greater than the more famous 1883 Krakatoa eruption the volcano Tambora in Indonesia erupted, taking 4,000 feet off its summit and killing thousands with the resulting ash cloud. In addition to the local devastation the ash cloud had a profound effect on the weather worldwide over the following years, including the Year Without Summer.

This is a clever book relating the stories of contemporary events for six protagonists from the other side of the world – Europe and North America - and how the poor summer affected them. We visit each story several times as the summer passes and the impact of the weather, whether it’s storms in France, snow in North America or cold in England is both a constant backdrop and a main character.

The stories are connected only by the weather and the timeline across 1815 and 1816, from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo to the Littleport riots, we visit Mary Shelley as she struggles writing Frankenstein and John Constable as he develops his art. Each story is written in it’s own unique narrator voice, which cleverly helps keep the stories separate. For those closest to farming and most reliant on the land the situation becomes more and more desperate as harvests fail and those already poor descend into poverty as food becomes scarce and expensive, finally leading to rebellion against the system and riot. The writing vividly portrays the poverty and despair in these chapters.

Overall this is a clever book.

I knew nothing about the year without summer before I read this book, so it was a really interesting read. I enjoyed how each chapter was a different story woven together to recall one event.

A very uneven story of 6 lives transformed in 1816. The crux of the change is the supervolcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 which had a dramatic effect on the world climate. The consequences were wide-ranging but by limiting her treatment of this event to one storyline Glasfurd fails to create a clear, unifying thread of it. Having so many storylines that never explicitly connect means that the reader had to do a lot of heavy lifting in creating conference and it just doesn't quite work. One of the problems of that this is historical fiction that lacks a lot of historical detail. There is too little explanation of the many events occurring which leaves the personal stories floundering. Fewer narratives with more depth and detail and more understanding of how the regulation contributed to them and was experienced by the characters, even if they didn't know it, would have created a stronger novel.

I met Guinevere Glasfurd when she was preparing this book, and even in talking about her previous novel, it was clear that her heart is in digging out history and bringing it to life. By bringing six stories together of 1815, tracing the impact of the eruption of Mount Tambora, The Year Without Summer links their experiences and brings a worldwide catastrophe closer and more to life than those who lived it would have known. Some of the characters are more familiar - for instance she includes Mary Shelley's experience of this time which led to her writing Frankenstein, as well as tracing some of the artist John Constable's story. The historic characters are brought to life; the fictional characters ring true and lingered with me a long time after reading it. The breadth of characters and the impact around the world is wide enough that there are experiences that will relate to each of us. I enjoyed this and I know my customers will as well.

Oh dear, I just couldn’t get into this book. I tried a few times but to no avail, I don’t like to not finish a book, but sadly this really wasn’t for me.

A really interesting and unusual book. I've got into historical fiction over the last couple of years and love a story like this... interwoven stories, separate events, a different time, a step into history.
Thoroughly enjoyable read.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I requested this book as it sounded right up my street, historical disaster with hints of Mary Shelley sounded perfect. I wanted to like it, I really did but I just couldn’t engage with the writing style. I found the narrative disappointing and disengaging and dare I say boring at times. I had to start over at least twice, I just couldn’t get in to it.

After a catastrophic volcano that left an island reeling with a year without summer as the ash descends, the effects are far reaching. This book is like a set of separate diary entries of how the ash-laden skies of Indonesia had an effect on world artists like Mary Shelley and John Constable across the globe as their skies greyed.
Depressing and thought-provoking I felt this showed how we are all connected and very small when it comes to environmental disasters. .

The Year Without Summer is a thought provoking story.

Although fictional it is set just after the very real eruption of Mount Tambora (Indonesia) in 1815 and shows how this cataclysmic event had power to affect the earth and people many miles away.

Through the lives of 6 characters (I liked the author writing about historical figures as well as fictional characters) we experience the fallout. Henry, the surgeon aboard Benares, describes in his letters to Emmalina what it is like close to and then on the island. John Constable, trying to get into the Royal Academy and the start of the land enclosures. Sarah who works in the fields, how agriculture changes the work available, the ensuing riots and the affect to wildlife. Mary Wollstonecraft and the affect the weather had on what would become a popular story. Hope Peter, a soldier returning from the Napoleonic wars and on his way to finding out what is left of his family home. Charles, on his pony to preach to his followers. All have very different lives but this one thing binds them. I was drawn into and experienced each and every life.

This story holds a powerful message … the earth and its systems are all connected which filters down to us and what we do …

This book is about the aftermath of a volcanic eruption.
I knew nothing about the events in the book before reading it.
The book is made of 6 chapters which are about people’s experiences. I found some of the characters hard to warm to which made me disengage from the book.

I requested this one as I love Mary Shelley, so was totally drawn to it. I didn't really like the other stories told, and there were six in total, but I still found this to be an enjoyable read and it felt almost like a cautionary tale on what could happen if we allow our climate to be destroyed. In that way I found it pretty chilling, as it's not too hard to picture this happening again. I tend to prefer multiple POV stories when they end up in one coherent tale at the end, but to be fair, it's my mistake for assuming that to be the case.

A romance, a thrilling adventure and a horror that is real... This book has everything and best of all talks about how Mary Shelley got to the point of creating Frankie.

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".

I've always had an interest in this topic, being a huge fan of Mary Shelley. The author's aim is evident throughout her weaving tale of the global climate issues after the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. She serves up a cautionary tale, that even a short term climate interference can generate huge suffering.

The story covers six different (and unrelated) stories in this time, chief among them Mary Shelley's summer in Switzerland which would lead to the writing of Frankenstein. Where some of the stories are deeply rooted in fact, others are looser in their approach to real history, but overall the entire premise rings true: we can't afford a world where the climate as we know it is destroyed. This entire story is both entertaining, and deeply thought provoking.

All in it together...

In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted. This far away, almost unreported event would have wide-reaching consequences as unusually bad weather conditions raised food prices and created famine around the world. Through the stories of six people in different spheres of life, Glasfurd shows some of the impact of the volcano and, without beating the drum too loudly, hints at what we might expect in a future of uncontrolled climate change.

The six main characters in the book are unconnected to each other except by the impact of the volcano, so that in a sense it works like a collection of short stories, although the format means that we get a little of one story followed by a little of another, and so on. This can make it seem a bit fragmentary at first, and not completely balanced since some of the stories are stronger than others. But together they give a good picture of how life was affected in different places and by different sections of society at the same moment in time, and so once I got used to the format, I felt it worked well.

Henry is the surgeon aboard the British ship Benares, sent to Sumbawa Island to investigate reports of loud explosions there. It is through his letters home that we are told about the immediate devastation of the volcano on the local population, and of the dire failure of the British rulers to provide adequate aid to the surviving islanders, whose entire crops were destroyed and water sources polluted. Some of the descriptions have all the imagery of horror stories, made worse by knowing that they are true.

Glasfurd then swings away from Indonesia to our more familiar world some months later, once the atmospheric effects of the volcano had begun to seriously affect weather patterns around the world. We meet John Constable, trying to make his way as a painter and gain entry to the prestigious Royal Academy; and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, travelling with her lover Percy Shelley and her young son on the fateful trip during which she would find the inspiration to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein. But Glasfurd shows us the lives of commoners too – Sarah, a peasant girl doing jobbing work on farms in the Fens at at time of famine and increased mechanisation, and caught up in the protests and riots arising out of the desperation of the rural poor; Hope Peter, a soldier returned from the Napoleonic Wars to a land not in any way fit for heroes, desperately seeking some means of earning a living in a country that showed him no welcome home; and across the Atlantic we meet Charles, a preacher in Vermont, caught up in the lives of the farming community there as crops fail and the already hard life becomes even harder.

While I found all of the stories had enough interest in them to hold my attention, the two that stood out most for me were Mary Shelley’s and the young farm worker Sarah’s. Mary’s story centres on the famous challenge among the group of friends that included Byron and John Polidori to each write a story – a challenge that only Polidori and Mary met, with Polidori’s The Vampyre perhaps owing its place in history mostly to its connection to Shelley’s Frankenstein. But this is not a cosily described fun vacation – Glasfurd shows the hardness of Mary’s life, partly because of the harsh weather of the year, but also because of the grief she still feels over the loss of her first child and the uncertainty of her unconventional status as an unmarried woman living openly with her lover. Byron doesn’t come out of it well, and nor does Shelley really – although they both encourage Mary to join in with the challenge by writing her own story, they don’t treat her seriously as an equal. Of course, since her legacy turned out to be vastly superior and more influential than either of theirs, I guess they were right, but not quite in the way they thought... ;)

Young Sarah I loved – she stole my heart completely with her frank and funny outlook on her hand-to-mouth existence and her irreverence and lack of respect for the farmers, ministers and general do-gooders who felt that the poor should be grateful for a penny of pay and a bowl of thin soup after twelve or fourteen hours of physical labour. Her section is given in the first person, and her voice reminded me a lot of the wonderful Bessy in The Observations, another feisty young girl uncowed by the circumstances of her life. As the younger farm workers gradually band together to demand better pay and conditions, I was cheering Sarah on, but with a sense of dread since this was a period in which the authorities showed no mercy to challenges from those they saw as potential revolutionaries.

The book has had a rather mixed reaction because of the way the stories are rotated without ever becoming linked. It worked for me, perhaps because earlier reviews meant I knew what to expect going in. While my enjoyment of the various strands varied, I found it a great way to give a panoramic view of the year, from rich to poor, artist to labourer, and of how all of society was affected in different ways by the climatic effects of the volcano. One I happily recommend. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, John Murray Press via NetGalley.