Climate Shock Realized: A Cover Reveal and Conversation with Nicholas Day About A World Without Summer

Today is my birthday. And because it is my birthday, I get to do whatever I want (or so American society has led me to believe). And what I want to do the MOST in the world right now… is interview Nicholas Day and reveal the cover of his latest book.

Can you blame me?

No doubt if you too read Day’s The Mona Lisa Vanishes, when it was published two years ago, it has stayed with you. Now he returns to us, and in the interim has grown even more ambitious. A World Without Summer (out September 9th) shows how something like a volcano on one side of the world can cause everything from starving cows to the creation of Frankenstein on the other. Or, as the publisher says:

“Discover how Mount Tambora’s catastrophic eruption plunged the world into darkness, altering the global climate and inspiring the likes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This remarkable story of disaster and survival is brought to life in a thrilling new illustrated nonfiction title from the award-winning author of The Mona Lisa Vanishes.

The world was upside-down. The wind was fire. The sky was ash. The rain was rock.

When Mount Tambora, a volcano on the edge of the Indonesian archipelago, erupted in April 1815, it was the largest explosion in recorded history. The land around Indonesia was a hellscape of fire and smoke. In the months and years that followed, the fallout—a cloud of impossibly fine ash— spread through the atmosphere. It killed harvests on the other side of the world. It turned farmers into beggars and their children into orphans. It turned sunsets into molten nightmares.

That same year, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley fled England with poet Percy Shelley. While sheltering from the worst summer in Switzerland’s history, she watched the explosive thunderstorms over Lake Geneva and caught the spark of an idea. Almost overnight, Frankenstein was written. 

In this masterful work of middle grade nonfiction, Nicholas Day traces the forward and backward of a single event, weaving in the many people, places, and things that were affected—and created and invented!—as a result, while tackling the ever-worrying issue of climate change.”

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Betsy Bird: Nick! The sheer delight in finding out you have another book coming out is what keeps us going in this cold, cruel world. And it’s an interesting pivot. You’re going from a book about the theft of a famous work of art to one focusing on the eruption of a volcano (which is probably the most simplistic pair of descriptions possible, but here we are). To begin at the beginning, what got you interested in 1816 and the eruption of Tambora in the first place?

Nicholas Day: Betsy! It’s a delight to be back here. I’ve been interested in Tambora and its aftermath for years and I’ve wanted to write about it for as long. It’s a story with everything. It opens in 1815 with the largest volcanic eruption since the last Ice Age—and that’s only the start. Because the fallout from Tambora creates a climate shock that suddenly alters everything about the world. The rain doesn’t rain when it should (or it doesn’t stop raining when it should). The sun doesn’t shine when it should (or it doesn’t stop shining when it should).

For a couple of years after Tambora, the world was suddenly very, very different. And no one knew why. And no one knew if it would ever be the same again.

If The Mona Lisa Vanishes is about the theft of a painting, then A World Without Summer is about a different sort of theft: our very assumptions about how the world works.

BB: And one single volcanic eruption leads, in turn, to discussions of the creation of Frankenstein, the writing of the song “Silent Night,” people blaming Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods (and tearing them down), and more and more and more. Tell us a bit of your research and how you went about figuring out what to include in the narrative.

Nicholas: The short answer is that I’m a magpie: I pick up the shiniest objects.

The longer answer is that you have to pick up the shiniest objects in the right order. This story is a global story, so there’s a lot scattered around to pick up. Because the weirdness of the Tambora years affected the whole world, everything was altered. It’s a massive event, and as often happens in a time of crisis, a lot changed in a very short period of time. That’s what makes it such an exciting subject.

Once I have a rough outline, then I know what to exclude—what I’m not going to pick up. I might really want to talk about something or someone, but if it doesn’t fit the arc of the narrative, no amount of wanting will make it fit. And even after that, I still pick up way too much—at this point in the process, I’m the person who says, No, I don’t need a bag, I can carry it all.

And on my way out of the store, I drop half the groceries.

What’s left in the final version is what the narrative can hold. With any luck, it feels inevitable.

BB: I rather like the grocery analogy. Though I’m a magpie in a different sense (each new project is a shiny thing to pursue). Here, there is a moment in the book when, after giving a long litany of what people suffered thanks to the weather, you mention that there’s a bit of a danger of fatigue in such descriptions. I’ve certainly experienced this when reading books about other historical catastrophes (example: M.T. Anderson’s SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD, which would pair beautifully with this book). But as a writer, did you also experience that in the course of your research? And how, as a writer, do you handle this misery fatigue while keeping your writing compelling?

Nicholas: I think I am no different from anyone else: once you know what happened, you very swiftly take it for granted. You harden yourself against the misery but—and this is the cruel part—without even knowing that you’re doing so. I talk about this process explicitly in the book: that the more we hear about something, no matter how horrible it is, the more normal it comes to seem.

In the book, I wanted to make clear the scale of what happened, but the most graphic material I cut or never included. It simply wasn’t necessary. Once you lead someone far enough, they’ll see the rest for themselves.

This is a story that looks into the darkness, but it turns toward the light.

BB: THE MONA LISA VANISHES is, ostensibly, about the theft of a painting but in the course of that book you broaden the scope and show how what it’s truly about is misinformation and what happens when people trust their guts rather than the facts (with pertinent ties to the world we live in today). Similarly, A WORLD WITHOUT SUMMER is seemingly about a singularly crappy year and a volcano, but you back up so nicely near the end and extend the narrative to a consideration of what happens when there is climate change on a massive scale, and (notably) how we didn’t understand what was happening then but we do know now. When writing these books, at what point in the process do you know what the larger story is going to be?

Nicholas: At the very beginning, but I don’t know how I’ll get there.

The larger story is a lot of what makes these books interesting to write. If The Mona Lisa Vanishes is just about someone stealing a painting—even the Mona Lisa—I don’t know if there’s a captivating book there. It’s the resonance that makes the story ring. The question is how you hit that bell. I want readers to intuit that larger story. And so when we approach the end, and extend the narrative outward, as you say, that should feel logical and warranted.
That’s the idea, anyway.

The story of Tambora is an extraordinary story. But there are a lot of extraordinary stories. And the reason for telling this story now is that the upheaval of those years offers us a glimpse of what it looks like what the climate goes haywire—when the things that we’ve assumed will always be there are not there. But I wanted readers to approach it as a story of disaster and survival and genius.

BB: What did you want to include but simply couldn’t? What facts were delicious but simply didn’t fit within the scope of your writing?

Nicholas: There’s so much, Betsy. But let’s take a minute for the Baroness von Krüdener, who was born into wealth and nobility but became in the Tambora years a spectacular messianic prophet. She began preaching that the apocalyptic days were the signal that the rich would fall and the poor would rise and the Lord would return.

People needed something to believe in, and the worse conditions were, the more credulous they were. They flocked to her. She was offering possibility. She was offering hope. Wherever she went in Switzerland, the roads filled with vagrants and beggars. They were on their way to see her. Her feats were fantastical. It was said that she’d fed 900 starving people with only 19 loaves of bread. She was—for a brief, bizarre moment in time—a hero, a mystic, the only person who could make sense of a world that had stopped making sense.

Anyway, all that got cut.

BB: You’re a brave man to admit as much. One element to this book that I thought was particularly interesting were the “Questions for the Reader, Also Known As You,” which pop up fairly regularly. These are moments when you step back from the story you’re telling to address kids reading this book today directly. It’s not so much breaking down the fourth wall as giving a bit of a pause to the action and, oftentimes, the misery. Were these sections always a part of the book from the start or did you add them in later? And what made you think to include them in the first place?

Nicholas: Even though it is the story of the eruption of Tambora, the climate shock that followed, the creation of Frankenstein—all of that—I sometimes think that the real subject of this book is thinking itself. How do we assimilate new information? How do we form theories that make sense of that new information? How do we evaluate whether those theories are valid or not?

Now obviously the best way to lose a reader forever is to write something like: How do we evaluate whether those theories are valid or not? I’ve fallen asleep already, and all I had to do was copy and paste it from the previous paragraph.

But I think these ideas can be thrilling, if presented in the right way. Voice can do a lot here. What I’m trying to do in these loose, voice-driven sections is to introduce these ideas, not in a top-down authorial sort of way, but a way that says we’re all here thinking this through together.

It’s particularly appropriate for this book, because the narrative ultimately finds its way to our story and our climate today, which is an echo of Tambora. And that’s something we need to all think through together.

BB: I don’t want to make the impression that the book is depressing because in spite of some of the things that happened in 1816 (spoiler alert: they weren’t great) the book is highly engaging. What struck me as interesting, though, was how you managed to find some things that made the world better after this moment in history. For example, the whole notion that helping people that need help on a governmental scale really hadn’t happened before. This is a book for young readers, so finding those moments can be key. But did you know what good came out of Tambora when you began, or did you have to search for it as you researched and wrote the book?

Nicholas: I’d read a lot about Tambora before I started writing the book, so I knew that there was this gem of hope glittering in all the mud. But I’d add that Mary Shelley’s story is also an inspiring story. Amidst all the thunder and lightning of those years—and amidst all the chaos of her personal life—Shelley managed to write a book that’s endured, a book that still haunts us today. And she was staggeringly young, only a few years older than the readers of this book will be.

BB: Though you credit them Acknowledgements, could you let us know some of the experts you consulted who were particularly crucial to this writing?

Nicholas: There’s been a rich vein of scholarship about Tambora in the last couple of decades, and I mined all that. But the problem is that because a climate shock touches almost everything, there’s so much that’s been studied. There’s volcanology, of course, and there’s meteorology and climatology. Literary studies—that’s Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. But then I ended up in places I never expected to be. Once you find yourself knee-deep in scholarship about the Opium Wars, or taking notes on a paper about the Gulf of Maine fisheries, you know you’ve gone too far.

BB: Forewarned is forearmed. Finally, I can’t imagine what you could possibly be doing next, so tell us! What’s next on your plate?

Nicholas: In 2026, I’ll have a hat trick of picture books, all published by Random House Studio or Neal Porter Books, and illustrated by people I’m very lucky to work with: How to Have a Thought, with Hadley Hooper; A Riddle of Eels, with Corey Tabor; and Nice Work, with Hala Tahboub. And then in early 2027, there’s a new book of narrative nonfiction, out with Random House Studio and the brilliant Annie Kelley: the story of the confidence game in America and Charles Ponzi, the original Ponzi schemer. The peerless Brett Helquist will be back to work his magic on that book.

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A plethora of riches! Eels AND Ponzi AND Helquist returns? Clearly it is my birthday.

Just to prove it, here’s the truly gorgeous cover (illustrated by Yas Imamura, alongside the work of Art Director Jade Rector):

A great deal of thanks to Nicholas for his incredible answers to my questions today. Thanks too to Annie Kelly and the team at Random House Studio for putting this all together. A World Without Summer is out September 9th. You’d be remiss to let this pass by. Remarkable stuff.

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Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews