The Sun of Summer

The Sun of Summer is the Ourense writer Carlos Casares’s final work and was published only a month after his death on 9 March 2002. It is a lyrical, retrospective novel narrated in the voice of a young woman named Helena. She recalls her childhood playing games with Carlos in the grounds of the family home in Beiro, a village north of Ourense where the author used to spend his summers and where his uncle was parish priest. Helena’s aunt, Mercedes, thinks the boy has a hairy devil in him, but her mother, Carmela, is charmed by him, especially when he has a go at Helena’s father, Indalecio, because of his predilection for priests. Over successive summers, Helena and Carlos will grow up in each other’s company. Later, Helena will marry Arturo, who studied with Carlos in Madrid. The novel is set in the summer of 1968 and traces the history of their relationship. It opens with a tragic event and, from this later perspective, Helena reveals the reasons for their closeness. In elaborate, flowing prose, Casares treats us to a journey into the past, which is also the past of Galicia, a past made up of several strands, which the author skilfully weaves together.

Carlos Casares (1941-2002) is one of Galicia’s best-known writers. He worked as a schoolteacher and later directed the publishing house Editorial Galaxia. The Sun of Summer is his third title in English, after the book of short stories Wounded Wind and the novel His Excellency. The author guest stars in another Ourense writer’s childhood memoir, Antón Riveiro Coello’s Wounded by the Wind, which is also available in English.