Ali Smith

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonalcycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens- art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.

Winter

The unmissable finale to Ali Smith's dazzling literary tour de force: the Seasonal quartet concludes in 2020 with Summer0.

Summer

This is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

How to Be Both

A celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms... It follows the unique achievement of her Seasonal cycle of novels - Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer - written and published in as close as possible to real time, between 2016 and 2020, absorbing and refracting the times we are living through- the 'state-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us' (New Statesman). 'Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now' Observer

Companion Piece

Talking her way into the Norfolk cottage that the Smart family is renting for the summer, Amber, an enigmatic con artist, insinuates herself into the lives of the family, forcing them to reexamine the events of their lives through her perceptions.

The Accidental

Hailed among the BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2011 by Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Patrick Ness, Sebastian Barry, Boyd Tonkin, Erica Wagner... A sparkling satire from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED and WOMEN'S PRIZE-WINNING author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting' Guardian 'Adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read' Literary Review 'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph 'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party . . .' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear...

There but for the

A Novel

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.

Gliff

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion - and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humour of her voice. How to be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance. Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.

How to be Both

From the Man Booker Prize shortlisted-author of the brilliant Seasonal Quartet series--a major new novel that promises to capture the present moment with Ali Smith's genius and bold spirit. Autumn. Winter. Spring. Summer. What comes next when the world continues to change? With an eye for rendering the timely in a timeless way and enchanting readers with lyrical prose and grace, Ali Smith's ambitious Seasonal Quartet--a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected--artfully guided us through #MeToo, Brexit, the refugee crisis, a global pandemic, and more. Now, Smith's highly anticipated Companion Piece looks to the future and builds upon this "time-sensitive project." This new novel stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like her groundbreaking series, it promises to capture the spirit of the times and offer a hopeful glimpse of the future. As always, Ali Smith will delight and surprise us.

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's remix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.

Girl Meets Boy

The first person and other stories

Sonbahar

Neil and Iona are a materialistic young Edinburgh couple whose relationship seems to be confined to arguing with each other about whether they should eat focaccia or ciabatta and working on 'case studies of the new Scotland'. Enter Kirsty, who may or may not be Iona's sister, who shatters their stultifying domestic routine by inventing tales by Finlay Finn McFinn, a spurious Highland seer. The Seer is, in part, a social satire, a sly poke at the 'new' Scotland and Smith is as playful as ever.

The Seer

A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.

Free Love and Other Stories

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices' Observer 'A story of our times... Savour it, because there is just one instalment left' Evening Standard 'Spring weaves a story around the most pressing issues of our time... Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to' The Times From the bestselling author of Autumn and Winter, as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to be both, comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal. Praise for the Seasonal Quartet: 'Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, and all the dimensions of love. It's a case not so much of reading between the lines as of being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way' Deborah Levy on Autumn 'The novel of the year is obviously Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain' Olivia Laing, Observer on Autumn 'Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days... Combining brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art' NPR on Winter 'Rank[s] among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present' Financial Times on Winter 'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised... Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain... Luminously beautiful' Observer on Winter

Spring

A collection of short fiction explores the complex web of coincidence, chance, and connections missed and made in life.

The Whole Story and Other Stories

There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 'Ingenious, shimmering fiction, written with a poetic grace that subtly illuminates the tensions between hope and desire, between past and present' Scotland on Sunday

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Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across… A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers ‘acting on a tip-off’ and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape… An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention… These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe’s new underclass – its refugees. While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

Refugee Tales

Short story collection first published by Granta in 1999.

Ali Smith

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