A Last Resort

Cory Oldweiler considers German author Franziska Gänsler’s debut novel, “Eternal Summer,” newly translated by Imogen Taylor.

By Cory OldweilerMay 6, 2025

• Fiction

• Environment

SOME YEARS FROM NOW, I’d love for an enterprising researcher to compile data correlating the rise of climate fiction with the number of statistical alarm bells attesting to climate change. There are probably too many variables for such a project to be practicable, however, starting with what exactly constitutes an alarm bell in an environment positively clangorous with them. Because despite comprehensive efforts by the current US administration to willfully ignore its existence, the scientific evidence for climate change grows more indisputable with each passing year. To wit, the average global temperature for the year 2024 was, for the first time, more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, exceeding the threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, which, in January 2025, the United States abandoned for the second time. Average planetary temperatures have been above that redline for 20 of the past 21 months, helping the year 2024 surpass the year 2023 as the warmest on record. It’s unlikely, though, that the new champ will keep its title very long given that the 10 hottest years since humans started keeping temperature records have all occurred in the past decade.

Among the myriad consequences attributable to these rising temperatures is the fact that fire damage seems to be getting worse. In the United States, studies have found that fires are burning more acreage and doing more damage over a longer period of the year—trends that likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone living in Western states, where the average temperature has risen faster and the increase in burned acreage has been more dramatic. In Europe, similar trends have been observed, though the planet’s fastest-warming continent at least doesn’t have to contend with many politicians or voters who deny the existence of climate change, even if the issue is perhaps not the political imperative it once was. In the dawning years of climate fiction, these sorts of alarming trends were most often extrapolated to imagine future dystopias born out of flooded coastlines, annihilating droughts, and harrowing storms. But as extremity becomes the norm, authors no longer need to look ahead; they can simply set their stories in the present day.

Which is exactly what German author Franziska Gänsler does in her debut novel Eternal Summer, a tense, atmospheric thriller whose primary threat derives from the literal atmosphere. Originally published as Ewig Sommer in 2022, which at the time was tied with 2018 as the warmest year in German history (a record surpassed in both 2023 and 2024), the novel is now available in Imogen Taylor’s English-language translation.

The story is set in Bad Heim, a fictional German spa town that is a husk of what it once was due to seasonal forest fires that have intensified as the area’s long, dry summers have grown longer and drier. About five years before the events of the novel, two people got caught up in the flames of these enhanced fires when the wind suddenly changed direction, prompting the government to begin identifying “dead man zones.” These statistical death traps, combined with the potential for respiratory diseases caused by the smoke-filled air, slowly smothered business in Bad Heim. After all, hazardous surroundings and unbreathable air are not terribly popular amenities on a health-and-wellness holiday.

As visitors started to avoid the place, Bad Heim locals moved away too, either due to safety concerns or financial imperatives, initiating a feedback cycle of decline. Soon the spa, the casino, and the surrounding vineyards were all defunct; even the once-grand Grand Hotel shuttered. In fact, the only Bad Heim hotel still operating during the novel’s endless summer is a five-room bed-and-breakfast with the “uninspired name” of Hotel Bad Heim, run by thirtysomething Iris Lehmann. When the novel opens, it’s October, and for the past six months, Bad Heim has had continual warnings against outside activity due to the burning conifer forests on the far side of the river. Though it remained open, the hotel Iris inherited from her grandparents has been largely empty, so she is thrilled when the “unusually beautiful” Dorota, who goes by Dori, and her young daughter Ilya show up seeking respite from the fires. A local hospitality ban prevents hotels from taking reservations online or over the phone, but nothing prevents Iris from accommodating guests who appear at her door.

At this point, Eternal Summer seems poised to be simply a well-told tale about a small group of women trying to cope with potentially life-threatening forest fires, but then Alexander Vargas calls the hotel inquiring about reservations. Something in his voice prevents Iris from telling him about the loophole in the hospitality ban, but Vargas is soon forgotten as Gänsler cannily redirects readers back to the climate crisis, introducing a small group of activists camped near the forest. Iris is taken by the protesters’ “youthful solidarity” and their “quietly and effortlessly woke” language. They “looked at these issues in a way that was totally new to me but second nature to them. Everything seemed fluid; they seemed to have torn everything apart with the aim of reconfiguring it, readjusting it, adapting it to a new and better future.” One of the novel’s great strengths is the way Gänsler presents these generational differences without ever seeming preachy or judgmental, simply explicating a divide largely based on experience.

When Vargas calls back again, this time asking after his missing wife and daughter and mentioning kidnapping, you might—if you’re like me and have watched too many 1990s thrillers—be reminded of films like Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), in which a menacing man tries to aggressively dominate or destroy a woman’s life. Without delving into spoilers, what ensues is ultimately more of a psychological thriller, albeit one heightened by the threat of the fires jumping the river. It quickly becomes clear that Vargas emotionally abused Dori, but the novel instills doubt, in both Iris and the reader, about the reality of the situation. Dori does behave quite strangely, disappearing at odd hours, ignoring her preschool-aged daughter, borrowing Iris’s car without asking. Further questions emerge when Dori starts to open up about her past, particularly an abandoned acting career, telling Iris she “was a different person” before marrying Vargas. “Do you ever have the feeling there was a point in your life when you took the wrong turn? That the whole rest of your life depends on that one moment?” Gänsler approaches considerations of Dori’s mental state and Vargas’s abuse with a great deal of sensitivity—not by trying to falsely equate the two but by having Iris question how involved she should get as an outsider, and an increasingly biased one at that.

Iris’s backstory is fleshed out through childhood recollections that reveal some (almost too neat) parallels between Dori’s situation and that of Iris’s late mother, who “hated” Bad Heim, leaving home at age 16 and only visiting “as a last resort.” Iris’s father is never mentioned, but her memories return again and again to the contentious relationship her mother had with her own father, Iris’s Grandad. Iris’s mother became “weird and glassy […] when Grandad was around,” and there are intimations that he may have physically abused Iris’s mother and Iris herself. There is no such ambiguity surrounding the clear evidence of his psychological abuse, with Iris recalling how he would berate her mother in lengthy speeches that usually included some version of the criticism “you’re no kind of mother for the child.”

While I mentioned cinematic touchstones above, it is also easy to envision Eternal Summer as a stage play, one that could be set entirely at Iris’s hotel save for two critical external scenes—one on the riverbank and the other in a car—that could be enacted downstage. Adding to the theatrical scale is the novel’s small supporting cast, the most prominent member of which is Baby, Iris’s next-door neighbor who has been around for decades. On one level, Baby is an archetype, the heavyset gossip who is simultaneously a straight shooter, but she’s also a delight, her backyard—where “time had stopped”—harboring a secret “cat garden” of great intrigue to Ilya. The only men to appear in the novel are Vargas and the specter of Grandad; even a list of musical artists played during one late-night scene are all women, giving the novel an intentional and greatly welcomed feminist slant.

Eternal Summer concludes with several great set pieces that I envisioned occurring on both the big screen and the small stage, a credit to Gänsler’s vision and Taylor’s lucid, intimate translation. There is even one unexpected final twist that tugs at the heartstrings and shows how thought-out this multifaceted debut truly is. While it’s currently hard to be optimistic when it comes to our climate future, I am already looking forward to the day that Gänsler’s most recent novel, Wie Inseln im Licht (2024), gets translated into English.