Summer
by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)
Ali Smith’s new novel is the final volume in a four-part series conceived after she missed her publisher’s deadline for delivery of 2014’s How to be Both. That book was turned out by Hamish Hamilton in six weeks, in spite of a manuscript delivered a year late, and an unusual split structure by which the story begins either in present-day Cambridge or Renaissance Italy, depending on which of the two different (and simultaneously published) versions you happen to read.