No Season but the Summer
Overview
What happens when our oldest stories fail us? When all the rules have changed? The classic myth of Persephone — reimagined for a modern-day reader.
Persephone spends six months under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for nine thousand years. But when she emerges this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control. While Demeter tries to regain her powers and fend off her daughter’s husband, who wants to drag his queen back underground for good, Persephone finally gets a taste of freedom. But what will this mean for her mother, her husband, and for the new shoots of life inside her?
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Hardback
- 216mm x 135mm
- 368 pages
- 9781911344919
- GBP£16.99
- 13 April 2023
Categories
Praise
‘Matilda Leyser’s novel takes the eternal polarities — love and hate, life and death, summer and winter, possibility and impossibility — and brings them crashing together in a tumultuous story of gods living alongside humanity, mother-daughter love and loss, and a glimmer of hope despite it all. In No Season but the Summer, our world is still dying, but it is putting up a hell of a fight as it does so, reminding us that we can fight too, and that fighting for our lives might start with listening to the earth.’
‘What a wonderful writer. Matilda Leyser’s work is precise, poetic, hard-edged, rhythmical. It seethes with life, and feels both ancient and brand new.’
About the Author
Matilda Leyser read English Literature at King’s College, London and then ran away to join the circus. She trained as an aerialist, working up a rope, collaborating with dance and theatre companies, making her own work, and performing in diverse venues, including the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Royal Opera House. After ten years in the air, she decided to come down to earth and take up the far more dangerous act of writing on the ground. She has two children, and is the founder and director of an international movement for creative mothers and carers called M/Others Who Make: https://www.motherswhomake.org. She also works as an associate director with Improbable, a world-renowned theatre company: https://www.improbable.co.uk.
