When Mount Tambora, a volcano on the edge of the Indonesian archipelago, erupted in April 1815, it was the largest explosion in recorded history. In A World Without Summer: A Volcano Erupts, A Creature Awakens, and the Sun Goes Out, Nicholas Day traces the devastating fallout from this natural disaster, which triggered a worldwide climate shock and a cloud of fine ash that destroyed harvests on the other side of the globe. Day, author of the Sibert Award-winning The Mona Lisa Vanishes, also relays a story of survival, community, and creativity, exploring how the Tambora disaster inspired such artistic masterpieces as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. PW spoke with Day about the genesis and aim of his latest work of narrative nonfiction.
How did you first come to be captivated by the story of the eruption of Mount Tambora?
It’s hard not to be captivated. We have this massive eruption, the largest since the last Ice Age; the global fallout, which was an abrupt climate shock; and the sense that life was suddenly very different and no one knew if it would ever return to normal. And no one knew why any of it was happening! It’s a sensational story. People had their lives turned upside-down because of something that happened on the other side of the world. It revealed something that we know all too well today: all of us take shelter under the same sky.
I was also interested in the idea of writing about climate change from the perspective of something that happened a long time ago, rather than from our own fraught perspective today. It can be illuminating to see part of our very strange present refracted in the story of a very different time, but it must be a completely enveloping story for young readers. A World Without Summer is a story that has a lot going on, with a massive volcanic eruption and unexpected fallout from that event, which causes a dramatic shift in the seasons all over the world. When readers emerge from the book, they may—I hope—see their own world very differently.
What inspired you to interweave the story of Mary Shelley’s creation of Frankenstein into the book?
In the aftermath of the eruption, all of a sudden everything people thought they knew about how our world works fell away. All our fundamental expectations—that snow shouldn’t fall in the middle of summer, for example, or that snow shouldn’t be tinted red or brown—were upended. It was a weird, wondrous time and it led to an explosion of creativity, and that’s where Mary Shelley enters the story—at an age when she was just a few years older than readers of A World Without Summer will be.
How did the eruption of Mount Tambora ignite Shelley’s creativity?
When the fallout from the eruption reaches Europe, Mary is in Switzerland, which is in a miserable state. The maelstrom outside sparks a creative maelstrom in her imagination. In Frankenstein, she gives us the story of a scientist who brings to life a creature he cannot control.
I was fascinated with how these stories are twinned. We have the reality of a global climate shock. And we have this novel written from within that crisis that’s a sharp preview of our own times, our own climate crisis. We too live in a world in which we have created something that we are struggling to control. Like Shelley’s scientist, we have caught ourselves in our own web.
Was it difficult to distill the multi-layered story you tell into an accessible book for middle graders?
It was a challenge but also an opportunity because there’s a tremendous amount of freedom in writing for young readers. They’re still learning how books work, and what books can do, and what the relationship is between the reader and the author—all of that is still being negotiated. And that’s especially true with nonfiction.
Young readers are often taught to think of nonfiction in terms of facts—we see this in the legacy of the term “informational books.” But adults don’t read nonfiction because they want to accumulate facts. They read it for the narrative pull, for the dramatic suspense, for the authorial voice. And to see young readers discovering that a book can have that and still be true—that’s really rewarding.
You draw in readers with chapters that directly address the reader as “You.” What does this accomplish?
This is a hopeful and inspiring book, but it is also a book about a crisis. So that’s a delicate balance. These sections emerged because I wanted to have a few built-in moments of looseness, when we step outside of the narrative and take stock of what’s happened. And I wanted this to be done not in a top-down manner, but in a we’re-thinking-this-through way. That’s partly because the narrative ultimately leads us to the story of our climate crisis today, which is something we’re all thinking through together.
What do you hope readers of A World Without Summer do with all the information you provide in the book?
I think that before action comes awareness. What I do is tell stories, and the work of telling a story is not so much changing the world as awakening to the world. If there’s something I hope readers take away it is that just the act of noticing matters. That alone is a profoundly important step.
There’s also a paradox that accompanies it: the more we notice something, the more present it is and the more normal it becomes—even if it is deeply abnormal. “Normal” is just what we call something that doesn’t require noticing. No matter how strange things are, they can quickly normalize. That paradox has a lot to say about the world we occupy right now. So, we can—we should—take careful note of what’s going on all around us and not let it pass by unawares.
In what way do Yas Imamura’s illustrations complement your text?
Yas does a wonderful job of letting readers see what’s happening in this story in a way that makes it feel like it is unfolding as they read it. She brings it to life in a particularly fresh and layered way.
I think illustrations in narrative nonfiction for young readers can do a lot of work, because they allow the reader to get lost in the narrative as a narrative—which I hope can make it feel as involving as a novel. Photographs can be wonderful, but sometimes they can take you out of the story, whereas the illustrations in both The Mona Lisa Vanishes [by Brett Helquist] and in A World Without Summer keep the reader inside the world of the book.
What’s next for you?
In 2026 I have three picture books coming out. First up is How to Have a Thought, a story about Charles Darwin and walking, illustrated by Hadley Hooper, which will be published by Neal Porter Books. Then there’s a pair of books from Random House Studio: Nice Work, illustrated by Hala Tahboub, a story about planting a peach tree; and A Riddle of Eels, a book about the wonder and magnificence of eels, illustrated by Corey Tabor. And in spring 2027, Random House Studio will publish my next narrative nonfiction title, illustrated by Brett Helquist. It’s about the con artist and the confidence game in American history and the story of Charles Ponzi—the original Ponzi schemer.
A World Without Summer: A Volcano Erupts, A Creature Awakens, and the Sun Goes Out by Nicholas Day, illus. by Yas Imamura. Random House Studio, $19.99 Sept. 9 ISBN 978-0-593-64387-7
