Product Description

It is late June and the summer of 1940 is about to become the myth that will define a generation. When Len Westbourne, an inexperienced fighter pilot falls in love with Stella Gardam, a radar operator with a far more worldly attitude, they are all too aware that their time may be short as the War becomes an epic struggle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF - The Battle of Britain. Told in intimate, alternate chapters from the perspectives of Len and Stella, That Summer matures into a breathtaking novel: a classic love story vividly evoking life during wartime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104846 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 271 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Andrew Greig, prize-winning novelist and poet, dedicates his latest novel "to the vanishing generation"--all who lived through the Second World War and That Summer, the summer of 1940 and the Battle of Britain. It is a heartfelt and eloquent homage to them all, but there is no distant memorialising here. Instead, its chapters, narrated alternately in two voices, Len's and Stella's, speak with wonderful immediacy and tactility. The naive and eager, yet quietly thoughtful Len is a 22-year-old fighter pilot and Stella, a radio operator who, a year older, is marginally more worldly. As the battle in the air intensifies, Stella sits at her screen watching the little falling blips, and imagining the young Fraulein on the other side of the Channel who is "my twin, my sister, my mirror. My enemy who is not my enemy", and worries about the foolhardiness of loving in wartime.

But love they do, in spite of and because of the exhausting dread, the anticipation and waiting, the ordinariness and impermanence of those haunting, sun-filled months. Noisy, frenetic pubbing, dancing, creeping home through the blackout darkness fills the ragged time in between Len's almost daily sorties in his "Hurri": "I thought of my fierce excitement just before I killed, and my numbness once I had, and then like Stella I said out loud, "What are we becoming?" And death permeates their very air.

On the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, Andrew Greig has written a captivatingly memorable elegy; its language is alert and vivid and its emotional reach both rich and subtle. --Ruth Petrie

Review
'The Battle of Britain may be rightly regarded as the most famous air conflict in history but Greig has made it something much more important for a generation now almost unimaginably removed: he has made it real... That Summer is an extraordinary achievement that deserves to have Greig, after several impressive novels, promoted to the ranks of the highest-regarded writers.' Anthea Lawson, The Times

From the Publisher
Praise for That Summer
‘The Battle of Britain may be rightly regarded as the most famous air conflict in history but Greig has made it something much more important for a generation now almost unimaginably removed: he has made it real . . . That Summer is an extraordinary achievement that deserves to have Greig, after several impressive novels, promoted to the ranks of the highest-regarded writers.’ Anthea Lawson, The Times

‘A novel of great power, intelligence and delicacy . . . a remarkable achievement, by far the best thing Andrew Greig has done, and a book which establishes him as a very considerable novelist.’ Allan Massie, The Scotsman

‘Greig’s achievement is to let us smell the flowers through the smoke, pain and confusion. This is a lovely book.’ Peter Cunningham, The Irish Times

Customer Reviews

A beautiful, moving story set during the Battle of Britain
I read “That Summer” by Andrew Greig just over a year ago now and it still haunts me. This is a beautiful, beautiful book which adeptly recaptures a time which has long since passed. Told in the first person narrative of the two central characters, a young RAF Hurricane pilot and his girlfriend, Greig’s novel has an immediacy which is truly spellbinding. The characters come alive to the reader with their thoughts, fears and feelings, and through this Greig makes this remote time become present. The humanity of the protagonists makes them far more accessible and “real”.

It is a poignant story but not in a weak way, indeed it is a powerfully moving book and one which will bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened reader. “That Summer” is a beautiful evocation of the turbulent summer of 1940 and one which highlights the common threads which make us human, regardless of time.

An Unmissable Love Story
Andrew Greig's excellent and moving novel tells the story of the relationship between an RAF pilot and a RDF ground-controller during the summer of the Battle of Britain (1940). As with all the best stories, it is far more than just this. Greig's novel looks at how we (the contemporary reader) view the past and, interestingly, how the past views us: how people in WW2 looked to the future, and imagined the world after the war: what it would be like; what they hoped it would be like.

'That Summer' is a love story (the most heart-breaking I have read in a long time) full of joy and pathos, subtle, beautifully crafted. Greig successfully evokes a time which for some readers will be very far from their world, and in evoking this time, he allows us to see some of its secrets. Always, though, it is marked off as a separate, and very special place.

The narrative frequently shifts between different first-person narratives (each of the lovers narrates different sections) and sometimes to a third-person, authorial voice, and through each of these voices Greig explores the hearts and minds of his characters. And I was left with the feeling that 'That Summer' was a novel about what it means to live - to enjoy life, while it is there, against all odds.

Although set during the Second World War, Greig's work is fiercely contemporary, and far from nostalgic. It is a novel that it is difficult not to be impressed by: compelling, thoughtful, inspiring and ultimately intensely, intensely sad.

A hauntingly sad and beautiful book
I finished this book this morning and have been drifting through today haunted by the images, still involved with Stella and Len, and with Maddy and Tad, still moved by the beautiful sadness of it all.There is an awful inevitability that traps the characters, the war which unremittingly takes its victims, but despite this, the love story of Len and Stella opens, flowers and deepens, and just captures the reader, so that at the close, as you look back over the years, and rummage in the hat box of Stella's memorabilia, glancing at the "silver-framed photo, gathering dust and glances through the years", the letters and the diaries, the people and the moments in time they represent, it all feels almost a part of your own life. Read and be moved.