Ali Smith

SPRING.

Ryan Mateyk

Ali Smith is such a treasure. These books are phenomenal at showing extremely despairing situations but somehow leaving us feeling hopeful in the end. The despair in this book focuses on immigrant incarceration and deportation. There’s some truly terrible things in here but there’s also many beautiful moments and I’m so happy I picked up Autumn on a whim last year. One more book to go before closing out this amazing series. 

I am bad at putting thoughts into words, unlike Ali Smith, but I very much recommend reading this and the other books in her this quartet!

Kendall McClain

Katie Chua

A Novel

Spring

ali smith continues her seasonal quarted with perhaps the strongest entry so far. in it she continues to explore more and more facets of post-brexit (or really, overall) uk, this time focusing on the english (but not the british) treatment of otherness, particularly immigrants and refugees but also the scottish, the irish.

reading this, part of me found the representation of the current political climate of british (english) society a bit heavy-handed. but the more i thought about it, the closer i got to the following conclusion: it may feel heavy-handed but it is an accurate reflection of the society we currently live in. it just that the times we live in are so absurd in their very real extremities that being faced with them, one cannot help but feel surreal.

I've never been so weirdly conflicted while reading a book. I loved it, then hated it, then realized Smith was being clever and loved it again. There were a lot of times I found the writing to be overdone, especially with Paddy and Richard. So much eye rolling happened every time they quoted an author or talked about Mansfield. Oh my goodness, how little I care about Mansfield.

But the overarching story of Richard and then Florence and the Machine, that was what sold it for me. I was so disappointed in Brit, what a shame.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020 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 tell 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.

Camila

Rebecca Bream

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020 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 tell 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.

M Puspita

Mariam Abdel-Razek

Jada

Marek R

Yasmin

alice browne

From the Man Booker-short-listed author of Autumn and Winter comes the highly anticipated third novel in the acclaimed Seasonal Quartet. On the heels of Autumn and Winter comes Spring, the continuation of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.

SPRING.

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