Used book – A Summer Season, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Rabinovitch

The eighth novel by Elizabeth Taylor, published in 1961, A Summer Season is certainly her most sensual book: the erotic sensuality of the passion between Kate, a charming widow and mother of two, and Dermot, a nonchalant and idle young man ten years her junior. This love makes everything more ardent: the heat, the smells, and the sensitivity of the lovers' surroundings. As the season progresses, the heavy atmosphere of this summer becomes even more tense, and one feels the storm approaching in this mixture of desire and contained anger, of disturbed tranquility and aspiration for calm. In this novel of maturity, Elizabeth Taylor proves herself the equal of Jane Austen and E.M. Forster: an incomparable chronicler of the surprises of desire and the amusing aspects of love. Elizabeth Taylor knows that the summer sun is but a lure, that its rays can be daggers. Elizabeth Taylor gently tears at the claw. She uses pastels. But poisoned pastels. (André Rollin, Le Canard enchaîné)