Hugo Awards 2026: The Summer War by Naomi Novik

When it comes to my annual Hugo Awards reading, my habit is to buy all the finalists for Best Novel in hard copy; in other categories I get them from the library and/or use the ecopies in the packet. However, I will pick up hard copies if they're by an author whose work I've come to particularly enjoy—such a case in point is Naomi Novik, whose work on both the Scholomance series and Temeraire I have rated highly, not to mention the excellent Spinning Silver.

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Originally published: 2025
Acquired and read: June 2026

Like Spinning Silver, The Summer War—finalist for Best Novella—is a loose fairy tale adaptation. If there was a specific fairy tale referent for Summer War, I didn't recognize it, but the whole story has a very self-conscious fairy tale vibe. Like a lot of contemporary fantasy, it uses this approach to think about what stories we tell, why we tell them, and how we might tell different stories.

Novik is one of those writers who is very economical, filling in a lot of character and worldbuilding without feeling like she's dumping it on you. Yes, there is a whole segment laying out the history of all the characters, but the narrative voice stops it from ever feeling like exposition. The basic premise is one I discovered for myself as I read it, so you might skip this bit if you like doing that yourself, but it's about the daughter of a lord who accidentally curses her gay older brother when he thoughtlessly does something cruel to her. He departs to go on quests as a knight in the land of the "summerlings" (these are a bit fae-like but we don't get so much of them as to annoy me), and so she must learn to navigate her relationship with the middle child of her family, who she has previously not thought much about at all.

That, to me, was the highlight of the book: the way Celia and Roric discover each other as siblings who had previously ignored each other. Before, they had only been bit players in the story their father was concocting for his life; following the departure of their brother, they need to figure out their own stories and their own lives.

In the last third of the book, the characters all end up travelling into the summer lands themselves, as they are ensnared in a plot between the summer prince and their own king, not to mention the consequences of the curse Celia created so long ago. This was interesting but not as interesting as what had come before. I appreciate what Novik was trying to do here: the strictures of the promises the summer prince has made and the curse are clearly meant to be a metaphorical stand-in for the way stories can create strictures on our own lives. I did really like the moment where Roric turned up and began telling stories, especially his final story. But I got a bit lost in the somewhat intricate web of curses and unbreakable promises, and the final solution felt a bit arbitrary to me, as opposed to a clever untying of a Gordian knot.

But for all that, it's well told and well done, full of nice little details of character, the kind of thing that makes the Temeraire series work so well.