The Summer Tree

The Summer Tree is the opening volume of The Fionavar Tapestry, the trilogy Guy Gavriel Kay began in the 1980s after helping Christopher Tolkien prepare The Silmarillion for publication. It starts in a Toronto lecture hall, where five friends listen to a visiting professor called Lorenzo Marcus and then learn that he is Loren Silvercloak, a mage who has come to their world looking for company at a celebration in another one.

Kay takes his time getting the five of them onto the road, and the second strand of the story belongs to Fionavar itself: a kingdom held in a drought that will not break until its High King does something he has spent years refusing to do, and a court divided over whether his exiled eldest son was right to say so out loud. The visitors are not tourists. Kevin, Jennifer, Paul, Dave and Kim are separated early, and each of them is handed a different thread of a much older story.

What separates the book from the portal fantasies around it is how seriously Kay treats the world on the other side. Fionavar has its own history, its own gods and its own obligations, and the five visitors are drawn into them rather than shown around them. Kim is met by Ysanne, the court seer, who recognises her as the successor her dreams promised and passes on the Baelrath, the warstone, together with a prophecy about the road its next bearer will have to take. The trilogy is one continuous story, so this first volume reads as the opening movement of a single long work rather than as a self-contained adventure.