The Longest Autumn

By Amy Avery

Flatiron Books 2024

The premise of Amy Avery’s novel The Longest Autumn is the stuff of elegant fantasy, similar in tone and agile simplicity to something like Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: there’s a mythical human world where the four traditional seasons are governed by four gods, the beings known as Winter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn who live in an adjacent supernatural realm called Sylvus. Each of these gods comes to the mortal world through a giant ornate Mirror, and their presence creates their season. Then at the appointed time, they go back through the Mirror to Sylvus, with the successive god taking their place. 

Each god is summoned by a human from the mortal world. These humans are trained in their devotions at the Temple that houses the Mirror, and at the appropriate moment, they use their own blood to pass through the Mirror and escort the next god back to oversee their season. 

For years, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Tirne has been escorting the god Autumn through the Mirror. She’s duly reverential, but she’s come to know the inhumanly perfect beings of Sylvus – and the other mortal escorts who regularly traverse the Mirror to do their sacred task. Her own lord, Autumn, is a beautiful young man in a cloak of perpetually-falling leaves (one of the many lovely little image-details sprinkled throughout Avery’s book), as lovely as a sunset, as aloof from most human concerns as a willow tree. 

But when Tirne escorts him through the Mirror as The Longest Autumn begins, this age-old tradition is badly ruptured: Tirne and Autumn are no sooner through the Mirror than it explodes behind them. Autumn instinctively protects Tirne (“crimson shards litter the ground, save the small circle of protection Autumn had formed around me”), but the deep shock of the event quiets the whole scene. As long as there’s no Mirror, Autumn cannot return to Sylvus – and so the world is trapped in one season. 

And the longer Autumn is stranded in the human world, the more human he becomes. As events accelerate, not only is Tirne increasingly suspicious of a mysterious man named Sidriel who might have been responsible for the MIrror’s destruction, but she’s eventually exiled from the Temple and forced to take the hospitality of an aunt she doesn’t particularly like. “Once you see that the gods are broken, just as fallible and horrible as the rest of us,” her aunt tells her, “you can’t unsee it, this aunt says. “They’re not horrible,” Tirne weakly responds, thinking: “Broken, maybe. Even fallible. But not horrible.”

All the while, Autumn’s growing humanity creates an attraction between him and Tirne that would once have been the utmost heresy. She tells herself that “my god is as distant and unknowable as ever,” but their growing shared feelings make them both think forbidden thoughts, particularly sparked by an enthusiastically-written dance scene: “As Autumn grasps my hand, leading me into a steady turn, I wonder what it would be like to tumble into his bed, to feel his teeth grazing my shoulder,” Tirne thinks. “What would a god’s magic feel like coursing through me?”

This combination of broad-strokes world-building and slightly hyperventilating prose (“I think of Autumn’s gloved hand in mine, how fear chanted his voice,” one of a million such passages goes. “I remember the deep, unrelenting sorrow that echoed across our connection, so many times”) raises the most persistent question murmuring in the background of The Longest Autumn, not one of execution but one of marketing. Yes, Tirne is twenty-six, but: she has a stereotypically flouncing gay best friend, she knows another escort who’s “nonbinary” and therefore requires the language-herniating “they/them” nonsense of the moment, she’s one young woman who’s the hinge of the world’s fate, and most of all, she’s constantly pulled between two young men, one handsome and inhumanly perfect, one dark and brooding. 

In other words, The Longest Autumn is YA. It isn’t being marketed that way, but Young Adult stakes and styles and sensibilities completely govern it. This may not matter to adults who’ve been consuming great piles of YA in the decade it’s dominated the world of commercial fiction, but on one level it’s odd that the folks at Flatiron Books wouldn’t give the books the kind of labeling that might help its sales. 

Fortunately for all readers concerned, it’s very good YA. Yes, the sub-genre virtually requires a certain amount of breathless overwriting, but Avery does a very clean, very insightful job of drawing Tirne’s worlds, both mythological and personal. Even while the land is being tortured under an autumn that’s stretching on forever, most readers will sense that somehow the Mirror – and therefore the order of the seasons – will be restored. And Avery paints that impending heartbreak in appealingly vivid terms:

How long until he forgets this jagged yearning, this hole that’s been carved into our souls? Days, weeks, months? I don’t think I’ll ever be free. The feel of his hands tangled in mine, the apple taste of his kisses, those I’ll carry with me until my body fails and my soul is carried through the Mirror one last time.

Mystery marketing or no, The Longest Autumn makes for heady escapist reading, regardless of where it gets placed in the bookstores.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News