That Summer - Softcover

Greig, Andrew

3.82

286 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571204732 ISBN 13: 9780571204731

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2001

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It is 1940 and Britain is at war with Germany. France has fallen and with Britain the next, and most crucial, country in Hitler's path, the threat shifts to unfamiliar terrain - the skies and an epic battle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. Lenny is a young and inexperienced fighter pilot stationed in Gravesend. After a meeting at a dance with Stella, a radar operator with a more worldly attitude altogether, he falls in love for the first time. She is his eyes on the ground, he is her protector in the air, and as the battle intensifies so their affair gathers pace in an increasingly uncertain time. Class and national barriers lose their distinction and a heady whirl of parties, drinking and promiscuity distracts from the more serious business at hand.

Told in intimate, alternate chapters from the perspectives of Lenny and Stella, That Summer matures into a breathtaking novel; a classic love story and a thrilling picture of life during wartime.

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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

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