Ali Smith

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984—look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.
 
A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Autumn is wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories.

Autumn

SPRING.

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

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 re-mix 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, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.

Girl Meets Boy

Presents a meditative collection of writings on the nature of art and storytelling and incorporates tribute elements to iconic writers and artists throughout history.

Artful

"Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we've read over our lives - our own personal libraries - make of us? What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they coax us endlessly to unexpected blossom; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make." -- Book jacket.

Public library and other stories

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

Hotel World

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

Helen Oyeyemi

Margaret Atwood

Emma Donoghue

Rachel Seiffert

Stella Duffy

Caroline O'Donoghue

Kamila Shamsie

Kirsty Logan

Linda Grant

Chibundu Onuzo

Eleanor Crewes

CN Lester

Susie Boyt

Claire Kohda

DRAGON. TIGRESS. SHE-DEVIL.
For centuries past, and all across the world,
HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH.
there are words that have defined and decried us.
HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE.
Words that raise our hackles,
VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT.
fire up our blood;
FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO.
words that tell a story.

In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time.

Stories of the wicket, wild and untamed

Furies

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

A Novel

Winter

The first person and other stories

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

Sonbahar

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

Ali Smith

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