All the Way to Summer: Stories of Love and Longing

by Fiona Kidman

Overview

A powerful collection of stories exploring love and longing from the award-winning author of This Mortal Boy.

Two mothers fight over who will wear a hat on their children's wedding day. A needle is lost somewhere inside a woman’s body. A writer waits with a suitcase for a man who never comes. 

This collection brings together Fiona Kidman’s finest and most scandalous stories, vividly depicting the joys of female desire and the pain of heartbreak, the thrill of illicit liaisons and the twists and turns of unconventional love. 

Sometimes joyful, often devastating and always beautiful, All the Way to Summer is a searing account of love and loss from a pioneering feminist icon.

'Tales of loss and betrayal and twisted love abound in this perfect collection’ Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913547646
Publisher:	Gallic Books
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dame Fiona Kidman OBE, Légion d’honneur, is one of New Zealand’s foremost contemporary writers. A novelist, short story writer and poet, she is the author of more than 30 books. She has worked as a librarian, radio producer and critic, and as a scriptwriter for radio, television and film. She lives in Wellington.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for All the Way to Summer

‘A magnificent book . . . Fiona Kidman is a splendid writer and this book exceeds expectations. Tales of loss and betrayal and twisted love abound in this perfect collection’ Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

'Kidman’s quiet, deft narratives startle with flashes of sensuous images . . . wise, subtle tales' Kirkus Reviews

‘Kidman's subtlety and her trust of the reader's intellect is a vein that runs through her work . . . insightful, restrained in parts, and always beautiful. They do not make a fuss, but they will sure as hell make you cry’ Otago Daily Times 

‘Powerfully encapsulates love in all its forms . . . the deep-felt love that springs from her acute powers of observation, a tight-knit family and enduring friendships’ Daily Post

Praise for Fiona Kidman

‘Kidman’s prose is precise, detailed, lyric' Irish Times 

‘Magnetic’ New York Times 

'Kidman, a poet, is a beautiful writer' The Times 

‘A masterful storyteller’ The Lady 

‘A truly gifted writer' Trip Fiction

From the Publisher

2023-12-06
New Zealand novelist and poet Kidman celebrates turning 80 by gathering 13 stories about the theme that has long preoccupied her: love.

“They are about love that changes the lives of my characters, one way or another,” Kidman writes in the preface. “Love, long or short, and often dangerous, is never forgotten.” The danger her characters face is the risk of being stifled by love; of losing independence and agency; of betrayal, too, and of succumbing, unwisely, to desire. In “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” Veronica, as a young teacher, explains to her students that history is “like a jigsaw puzzle or a mystery story, one piece leading to another. We can, each one of us, look at a landscape or a character in history, or even a set of dates, and see something different from what anyone has seen before.” Years later, she looks back at a landscape that shifts her sense of her own reality. Other women recall narrow escapes, willful blindness, or a “wild card” that changed “the symmetry” of their lives. A woman who returns to her ex-husband explains why: “It was because I had a second chance to choose. You don’t at the beginning when you’re young. Or not when I was young. You got swept away by forces beyond your control.” Her decision, she adds, “was quite unconventional.” Kidman’s quiet, deft narratives startle with flashes of sensuous images: “salmon-pink carpets that roll fleshily through the rooms.” A distraught new mother holds a baby asleep in her arms, “as if he were a snake in a basket.” Lovers lie in bed, their “skin like twin silks sliding together.” At best, in Kidman’s telling, love creates a place of safety and calm for characters who learn, at last, “that what seems romantic on the outside can be a substitute for grief.”

Wise, subtle tales.

Kirkus Reviews