‘Nature is always ready to turn nasty in Darling’s twisted pastoral tale of two children stranded on a remote English farm after the death of their parents ... Darling chronicles their slow descent towards a state of nature ... in exact and compellingly sensuous prose’
– Sunday Times
‘Darling's restrained, distanced narration takes us into a timeless realm of fable ... [his] floating third-person narrative circulates between the three main characters, close to the lonely consciousness of each ... Summer in the end stands as a deeply felt parable about children who fall outside the social net’
– Guardian
‘Darling has a wonderful way with words. He evokes the atmosphere of lethargy, of helplessness and disappointment superbly ... strong scenes and sumptuous writing’
– Books Ireland
‘a quietly haunting account of the disintegration of family life through a prism of confinement in nature ... it comes recommended’
– The Sunday Business Post (Ireland)
‘This is a dreamy book, replete with vivid imagery, both beautiful and repellent that carried me away to a different place and time entirely, one made almost indefinable by the author’s elusiveness. Summer is a magnificent and spellbinding novel; emotional, powerful, intense and undeniably stirring and deserves lavish acclaim’
– The Bord Gáis Book Club (Ireland)
‘... what Darling does particularly well in Summer is delineate the change in his protagonists ... It’s in details like this, and as a study of character, that Summer shines most strongly’
– Fiction Uncovered
‘Darling’s prose is unpretentious, his soft and sensual writing blankets the story and transforms it into an almost physical experience: that of isolation, of immersion into an extreme place of confinement, which takes away life and then returns it. The plot is full of suspense, with sentences and words that perfectly reflect disorientation and desolation’
– La Repubblica (Italy)
‘Darling, the new star of English literature’
– Libero (Italy)
‘Tom Darling has picked a difficult genre for his debut novel: a tragedy of loss. The real protagonist is the location, a remote outpost of silence whose language of solitude Grace and Billy will soon learn, under the relentless sun. Grace and Billy reveal their painful discovery of the self, in a world in which they have only themselves to rely on’
– weekly supplement ‘D’, La Repubblica (Italy)
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