The still-young genre of climate fiction—or ‘cli-fi’—dreams of inspiring change, yet critics have pointed out that its overwhelmingly dystopian narratives are more likely to trigger paralysis or apathy; if we’re doomed, what’s the point? Within this contemporary affliction of passivity, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer juxtaposes its burning world with a potent human story of choice, stasis, and compassions, cementing its varied cast in an unmistakably contemporary mode, yet with the same ethical conundrums that have confounded us since time immemorial. The sheer breadth of our current problems can wither us into an insular complacency, but Gänsler powerfully points us towards the matter of our freedom. We’re delighted to present this timely novel as our Book Club selection for the month of May—it’s a hot one.
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Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler, translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, Other Press, 2025
Once upon a time, the promise of an eternal summer may have seemed idyllic. In the popular imagination, the season has so often signified carefree vacations, sandy shores and glittering waters, balmy nights and languid mornings, the well-deserved time-out from a life of hard work or study. But it’s 2025. Summers have become increasingly hot. And long. And dry. I can vividly remember the eerie smog and the smell of smoke in the air as the 2019-20 bushfires raged across the southeast of Australia; even though I was hundreds of kilometres from any active fires, I had my first, pre-COVID experience of donning a mask for daily activities. Holidays were cancelled. New Year’s celebrations abandoned. Beach towns evacuated. This is the summer of our times—and sometimes even winter, too; just this January, southern California saw wildfires spreading into urban areas, decimating homes and taking lives and livelihoods, while less well-publicised infernos have also blazed through parts of South Korea and South Africa.
Somewhere in what seems to be Bavaria, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer is sweltering a few years from now, in a future where the climate target of a 1.5°C threshold is no longer a goal even for activists. It’s October, and an empty spa resort is being threatened by the fires raging through the nearby conifer forests for the fifth or sixth year in a row. It all seems hard to keep track for Iris, who is living out her own lonely summer days in this hotel that she inherited, sunbathing and checking the latest weather warnings—but only when the situation isn’t so dire that they’re played over roaming loudspeakers: ‘Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home.’ Although she’s aware of the danger and trusts the climate science, her physical and economic precarity—hotel bookings are no longer allowed, even if anyone actually wanted to take the waters in this water-restricted spa town—are not enough for Iris to leave. She has no one and nowhere to go to.
Then one Tuesday, a mysterious, stylish women about her own age and her three- or four-year-old daughter show up amidst the heat and the ash, asking for a room. They don’t have much with them, not even masks, and the woman seems reluctant to provide her ID or any information beyond their names. It doesn’t seem a far leap for Iris’s neighbour, Baby, to guess that they are running from something, probably a man. With the threat of the fires around them, there must surely be some greater oppressive force that would make Iris’s resort their last resort, just as it had been for Iris’s mother: ‘When Mom drove me to Bad Heim it was always on an impulse, always in a cloud of dust, always as a last resort.’
As the fire threatens to close in on them, so too does this aloof woman’s past; the hotel’s phone starts ringing. Although Iris doesn’t want to jump to conclusions and is reluctant to take sides, it becomes increasingly clear that the confident, charming man from Berlin on the other end of the line must be the woman’s husband, and that he poses a threat. He never names his wife and daughter, and while this at first seems like a plot device to help Iris continue to stay uninvolved, it becomes increasingly clear that this anonymity also reflects the man’s disregard for Dori and Ilya as people in their own right, not just characters filling roles in his comfortable life. The man claims that Dori is unwell and an unfit mother, and that he just wants what is best for her and his child. Dori, meanwhile, finally opens up to reveal the way her husband gaslights and represses her.
Iris’s own mother had a fraught relationship with her father and left home at sixteen, creating an adventurous but unstable upbringing for her young daughter before she died at only thirty-two, leaving the then-twelve-years-old Iris to be raised by her grandparents and aunt at the hotel. Even before her mother’s death, however, Iris had felt unnoticed, her needs less important than her mother’s constant drifting and hunger for ‘attention, affection, approval’. Iris remembers her mother as beautiful but with ‘darting eyes that didn’t see me’ and a ‘nervous tension’ that Iris also recognises in Dori. The two visitors thus arrive into a world where Iris seems to have become stuck, unwilling to leave Bad Heim and unable to fully engage with what is around her. Floating above the novel’s dual threats of fire and coercive control, then, are the equally difficult questions of how to take care of those around you while remaining true to one’s own needs, and how to forge meaningful relationships in an uncertain world. In other words: Eternal Summer asks how and when we should not simply be but also act.
So unfolds a gentle thriller that interlaces climate catastrophe and domestic violence with post-COVID isolation and postmodern apathy, as the suspense of the women’s predicaments is balanced by the suspension of volition embodied by Iris. Will they return to the comfort of familiarity, or forge a new future together?
As we emerge from the COVID era and battle through—or bury our heads in the sands of—the Anthropocene, Eternal Summer’s themes of human-induced climate change, abuse, mental illness, queer relationships, feminist solidarity, activism, community spirit, and individualism, along with its health directives and travel restrictions, all condense into a highly topical novel that has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim. Despite the difficult themes it opens a window onto, Eternal Summer is not in itself a difficult read; Gänsler has produced a measured, carefully constructed debut that speaks to the issues of her times through Imogen Taylor’s smoothly flowing, unmarked translation. Were it not for the town’s clearly German name—Bad Heim—and the occasional reference to real German cities, the novel could be set anywhere in the northern hemisphere, further increasing its ease and relatability.
Gänsler convincingly uses the backdrop of climate catastrophe as an ongoing tension, with its visceral heat, smoke, and ash. Yet, beyond the mass exodus from the town and the sense of foreboding hanging thickly in the air, the impacts of climate change on the lives of Bad Heim’s remaining residents seem less important than the fact of Iris’s isolation. While the novel writes the dangers of global warming into the fabric of the text, the world outside the pocket of the town seems largely unaffected by the crisis, beyond some vague ‘global upheavals’, and the causes and impacts of these conifer fires burning year after year is neither explained nor explored. Despite the apocalyptic setting, there seems to be little urgency, and the people living at the coalface feel that they have ‘no way of influencing the situation’; even the climate activists on TV campaign with passion but little hope—perhaps because, as the activists say, ‘it’s already too late’. There’s nothing to be done. So it is that even with the spectre of a fiery death, smoke inhalation, or heat stroke, the stakes of the catastrophe seem oddly low. After all, when the rains come, Iris will be able to continue in the stasis she’s inhabited for so long, and when the situation gets too hot, the activists’ parents will come and pick them up. Their actions and ideas thus risk appearing like virtue signalling at worst, and youthful idealism at best, which Iris finds simultaneously enthralling and alienating: ‘. . . their language was quietly and effortlessly woke. They made me feel old-fashioned.’ In this, Gänsler creates an uneasy tension between the Millennial and Gen Z figures as they circle the major moral and existential issue of our time. No easy solutions are offered by the novel here, which seems to criticise both apathy and action.
Other aspects of the novel, too, seem to equivocate. The novel’s dramatic climax relies on the rallying call of Baby, who brings the town’s remaining inhabitants together in an act of community spirit. Despite this, she tries to convince Iris that each person must ultimately act in their own best interests, opining a libertarian view that is starkly undercut by the characters’ actual circumstances: ‘Life’s a buffet,’ she tells Iris. ‘Everyone’s free to pick and choose.’ But as the novel clearly demonstrates, Iris and Dori are hemmed in and weighed down, their buffets depleted. Gänsler’s novel never puts forward a firm solution to the question of how to change one’s circumstances with limited options, or to the urgent contemporary conundrum of how to balance solidarity—or even caregiving—and the self. Amid all these frictions, it may come as a relief that the novel does tell us explicitly that there is at least the chance for an alternative life (if we are ready to own a different choice from the buffet): always ‘[a]n opening, a promise’.
Through the novel’s implicit and explicit mirroring of Ilya, Dori, and her husband against Iris, her mother, and grandfather, Iris is finally able to come to terms with her mother’s decisions, even if the novel might ultimately imply that Dori’s very different choices are equally valid, simply because they are hers to make. The questions surrounding Dori and Ilya are certainly the novel’s most interesting and uncomfortable ambiguities: Who are we—and Iris—to trust when faced with Dori’s and her husband’s conflicting stories, or is it possible that both contain elements of truth? What in this complex web will be best for Ilya? How might someone inflict pain on one person while providing comfort to another? Eternal Summer paints a sensitive, painful picture of male domination and violence, but also forces us to consider how spheres of abuse, mental illness, and neglect might intersect. In dramatizing these pressures, Gänsler compellingly blurs the lines between heroine and villain, as well as between solidarity, self-sacrifice and self-preservation—conflicts perhaps more relevant to all of us than we’d like to think.
Rachel Stanyon is a translator from German into English and a senior copyeditor with Asymptote. She holds a master’s in translation and in 2016 won a place in the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme. Her first full-length non-fiction translation has recently been published with Scribe.
*****
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