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*The Perfect Summer* chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago, when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson’s rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals--among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the queen--*The Perfect Summer* is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era. ** ### From Publishers Weekly *Starred Review.* The granddaughter of Bloomsbury notables Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson chronicles the minutiae of the hot, sunny summer of 1911, when the rich crammed in a succession of parties as industrial strikes almost brought the country to a standstill, and WWI loomed on the horizon. Under Nicolson's lavish attentions, "upstairs" and "downstairs," the weighty and frivolous spring to vivid life. While Mary approached her upcoming coronation as queen with dread, Leonard Woolf fell in love with his Cambridge pal's sister, the budding novelist Virginia Stephen. The bewitching marchioness of Ripon arranged for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to perform at Covent Garden, and the *Times* revealed that certain servants were selling juicy tidbits about their aristocratic employers to American newspapers. Trade unionist Mary Macarthur's fight for women's rights meshes artfully with racy novelist Elinor Glyn's adulterous affair with ambivalent lover Lord Curzon. Lady Diana Manners's tart observations of her debutante season segue to a rendezvous between a footman and a kitchen maid. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources—from Churchill's memoirs to the tell-all *What the Butler Winked At*—journalist Nicolson's debut, a British bestseller, serves up a delightfully gossipy yet substantial slice of social history. Photos not seen by *PW*. *(June)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From Booklist *Starred Review* The storm of the subtitle is the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and Nicolson focuses on a particular period of quiet before that storm: the English summer of 1911, which boasted extreme heat but also day after day of sunny weather. European life was on the precipice; the forthcoming horrible years of war would bring a sudden modernism to how people lived, from king to commoner. But in that summer of 1911, "England was plump with promise," and the author seeks to "evoke the full vivid richness of how it smelt, looked, sounded, tasted and felt to be alive" in the months from May to September. She reconstructs the lives of several English individuals whose particular life-tales add to the complete picture of those ironically self-contented months. Nicholson visits, among others, Queen Mary, wife of the new king, George V ("The people in the waiting crowd were gratified to see how splendid the new Queen looked in her beautiful frock and diamonds"); politician Winston Churchill ("Life without champagne was inconceivable for Winston"); socialite Lady Dianna Manners ("the golden girl of the summer"); and butler Eric Horne ("Not quite the faithful servant he was assumed to be by the deluded individuals who employed him, Eric's was an increasingly cynical view of the changing world"). As entertaining as it is edifying. *Brad Hooper* *Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*