A guide to speculative fiction

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We've rounded up 20 great books we think everyone should read by 50

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20 books everyone should read in their fifties

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Features

Why you should always read the epigraph

Best dystopian books

The best dystopian books of all time

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Where to start with Ali Smith

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What we learned about writing from Ali Smith’s Penguin Podcast interview

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In defence of the exclamation mark!

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Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: an oral history

Books to transport us to other lands and places

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Books to transport you to different places and times

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The classics we fell in love with, as chosen by our authors and readers

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Ali Smith returns with Spring: ‘We must look to ourselves for hope’

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Ali Smith on Autumn, Brexit, and the shortness of life

Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

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9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

Gliff

‘Miraculous . . . tender, hilarious and ultimately uplifting. A ray of hope’ Paul Murray, Irish Times 
 
Once upon a time, not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint round the outside of their house . . . 
 
So begins the freewheeling and urgent new novel from Ali Smith – the story of two young people and a horse called Gliff, on the run from history as it takes a turn for the worse. 
 
‘A voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear’ Financial Times 
 
‘One of Smith’s most propulsive stories – a dark adventure with high stakes, which is still a sparklingly crisp read. A new Ali Smith book is always an event’ Holly Williams, i 
 
‘Ali Smith’s marvellous Gliff considers the complexities of our present moment and the thorny, bridling potential of possible futures with wit, care and craft. A masterpiece of storytelling about storytelling, exploring the delighting, dangerous power of language and connectivity’ Eley Williams 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BOWKER VOLCANO PRIZE 2025 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2024

Here is a voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear . . . Smith is good at fable-ising, and at taking a young perspective in order to question afresh systems and inherited knowledge . . . Smith’s fiction teaches with vitality that there is no such thing as a futile question

Ali Smith’s miraculous Gliff is at once a pitch-black take on the authoritarian future and a tender, hilarious and ultimately uplifting portrait of two young siblings as they battle to escape it. Full of jokes and wordplay, kindness and connection . . . A ray of hope after a year like this one

A vivid, alluringly chatty novelist capable of deft and unforeseeable sidesteps . . . Smith’s new novel is a charm . . . Smith excels at the creation of a lost, curious, intelligent mind adrift in a world of surprises and the unforeseen . . . Smith has created a gloriously strange world

Gliff is one of Smith’s most propulsive stories – a dark adventure with high stakes, which, despite its bleak subject matter, is still a sparklingly crisp read . . . Typically tantalising stuff from one of our most playful writers . . . [Smith] is as frisky as ever, peppering with puns, and making hay with homonyms imbues her characters with this linguistic exuberance . . . A new Ali Smith book is always an event

Unendingly playful [and] mind-expanding . . . Gliff draws battle lines between art, language and Big Tech . . . The meaning and meaningless of our words is an overarching theme of Smith’s oeuvre . . . Smith does not tire of the wonder of language [and] has mastered a style that is both disconcerting and utterly humane

Ali Smith stakes her claim amongst the most inventive living British writers . . . Gliff is another fizzing firework display, with conceptual shenanigans and running prose put in the service of hot-button social issues . . . a freewheeling narrative that mixes jeopardy-laden drama with restless digression on everything from agrochemicals to AI

A study, a confrontation, a rejoinder, a folksong: Ali Smith's marvellous Gliff considers the complexities of our present moment and the thorny, bridling potential of possible futures with wit, care and craft. A masterpiece of storytelling about storytelling, exploring the delighting, dangerous power of language and connectivity

As usual with Smith, the gorgeous prose will swirl in your head. Gliff is challenging and enigmatic

Part allegory, part dystopian fiction, altogether thrilling . . . one of the most affecting stories about resistance to blind power I have read . . . quite simply the best book I’ve read this year

If Smith’s recent books were a handbook for 21st-century life, Gliff is a warning as to what will happen if we ignore their lessons

Ali Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously . . . But the cleverness she celebrates is innate and ordinary. It is human, in other words, and Gliff is the mark of just such a native genius

A poetic, dystopian puzzlebox . . . a story about two children who have lost their mother, with moments that are spare and full of powerful feeling . . . Gliff is above all a book that forces you to be comfortable with ambiguity. It will be partnered next year by Glyph, a companion novel which promises to reveal a story hidden in this one. It will be a joy to puzzle it out

A witty dystopian puzzle built on ‘unbelievable believable hope' . . . Smith’s worlds are always perfect-pitch, but the genius of Gliff left me blasted

Beautiful and visionary . . . [A] propulsive dystopian novel about how to refuse the imperatives of fascism, how to stay open to strangers in all their guises

Fizzily fresh and vibrant . . . A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer

One of our most playful and political writers

[The] idea of freedom . . . is both Smith’s great theme and a description of her methods

Ingenious, warm storytelling. With clever kindness, Smith speaks to the uprisings that are possible, when we collaborate in a divided world. Through defiant wordsmithery, Gliff glimmers with the perennial resistance that storytelling can offer

As she takes aim at some of the more worrying aspects of the modern world, Smith employs sublime wordplay, a tribute to language and its possibilities

[Smith’s] prose skips lightly across the page, no matter how dark her subject matter

Entertaining and sophisticated and clever

An exhilarating and often startling read . . . Ali Smith looks at a sentence the way a mechanic looks at an old car engine. She takes her wrench and deconstructs an unsuspecting word into its constituent parts, swaps one element for another or adds something she felt was missing, then reveals with a flourish that her word has become a brave new world

A remarkable read; poignant, perfect, and utterly terrifying

The inimitable Ali Smith returns to beguile . . . Smith movingly explores the notion of resistance, and asks, in a voice full of hope, what a world should, and could, be

The lush narrative doubles as an anthem of resistance . . . against tyranny and the destruction of the environment. Inspired references to Charles Dickens and Virginia Wolf add to Smith’s literary tapestry. The results are extraordinary

A literary collosus . . . Gliff is playful, challenging, and like nothing else we’ve recommended this year!

Playfully charts two children’s resistance to a state dystopia of surveillance and control

As for my stocking: Ali Smith’s Gliff, please

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

O brave new world, that has such people in't. 
 
Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. 
 
What does it mean? 
 
It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. 
 
What would that actually be like? 
 
In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? 
 
And what’s a horse got to do with any of this? 
 
Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of How to be both

Companion piece

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet 
 
One day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she's been left with after she's spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom: 
 
'Curlew or curfew? You choose.' 
 
And what's any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago? 
 
Ali Smith's novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities. 
 
'[An] entertaining and expert portrayal of the world we live in, seen by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences' Telegraph 
 
'[Companion piece] makes you look at the world afresh. For me, it turned a cold and depressing day into a bright one' New Statesman 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022

A lockdown story of wayward genius . . . Lyrical visions alternate with fables and farce, history with Covid, in the scheme-busting fifth part of Smith's seasonal quartet

Scintillating . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious

Both a standalone novel and a coda to her Seasonal quartet, Ali Smith's latest, set during the pandemic, offers a wise and humane voice for perilous times

Smith's way of telling a story - looping in time; switching from one fast-flicking consciousness to another; tying up radically different periods of history in a single place - and her amused delight in the flexibilities of language feel not only modernist but, better than that, modern

Smith's work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful

Like Smith's other novels, Companion piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements

It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith . . .  Smith is intellectually rigorous yet democratic, warm and - crucially - playful

'A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.' 
 
Here we are in extraordinary times. 
Is this history? 
 
What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? 
What have we lost? 
What stays with us? 
What does it take to unlock our future? 
 
Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms. 
 
'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.'

Free Love

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
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. 
 
© Ali Smith 1995 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
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.

Like

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
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. 
 
© Ali Smith 1997 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

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.

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021

Summer

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 
 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 
 
 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
 'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' Guardian 
 
In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. 
 
 This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? 
 
 Summer. 
 
 Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. 
 
***** 
'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force' Evening Standard 
 
 
'Exquisite. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon 
 
 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times

An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet

The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force that captures the nation's psyche exquisitely

This singular writer has found her moment

A maestra's portrait of her age. . . remarkable

Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance

The bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day's vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer

Smith bring[s] this brilliant quartet to a satisfying close

The final flourish of a mazy and beautiful quartet

The novel's hopeful message about the healing power of friendship ensures the quartet ends on a feel-good note

A remarkable experiment with timeliness in fiction

In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. 
 
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? 
 
Summer.

The Accidental

'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema . . .' 
 
One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely? 
 
'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times 
 
'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer

Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious, exhilaratingly sharp-eyed . . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh

Joyous, a shot across the bows . . . writing as rapture, as giddy delight

An astonishing book - funny and moving, playful and shocking. It is what one hopes for in a modern novel, and yet it confounds all expectations. It is complex. It is beautiful. It is exhilarating. It is fiction at its most artful

A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last

Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention

Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.

Spring

SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 
 
 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
 'Her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices' Observer 
 
 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. 
 
Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. 
 
***** 
 
'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent 
 
'Smith is a masterful storyteller . . . Savour it' Evening Standard 
 
'Infectious in its energy and warmth' Daily Telegraph

Luminous, generous, hope-filled... The third book in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices... [Ali Smith] is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now

Is there a writer so critically acclaimed and universally beloved? ...Autumn, Winter and Spring are stories of the unlikely connections human beings can make and the cost exacted when those connections are broken. They are state of the nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us: the nation is our choices, our fears, our losses... [Ali Smith] is the national novelist we need in 2019

An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons

Smith is a masterful storyteller... Spring is political but Smith is more concerned with the human fallout of current affairs then the machinations of elites... Through her account of unlikely friendships, Smith brings human values to the fore. Savour it, because there is just one instalment left

Spring weaves a story around the most pressing issues of our time... [A] bubbling, babbling brook of a book...Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to

A powerful vision of lost souls in a divided Britain... As Smith's Seasonal Quartet moves towards completion her own role in British fiction looks ever more vital. The final page proclaims spring 'the great connective'. It's not a bad description of Smith herself

Beguiling... The eagerly awaited third instalment

Infectious in its energy and warmth

Just when things were starting to look really bad, along comes the third instalment in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet to lift us out of the gloom... An extraordinary embodiment of the ways in which storytelling connects us... The work of Katherine Mansfield and Rilke, Greek myths and the propulsive lyricism of spring itself, thread together in narratives of loss and rejuvenation

The third of her exceptional Seasonal quartet, which riffs back and forth with Autumn and Winter to expound on the importance of hope to move us beyond the darkest of times

The most compelling and coherent of the three books... Smith, as always is interested in how a story gets told, and who gets to tell it

Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf of our times.

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, 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.

Winter

A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
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 Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith 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. 
 
Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. 
 
***** 
 
'Dazzling . . . Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Graceful, mischievous, joyful . . . Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope' Independent 
 
'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit . . . Luminously beautiful' Observer

Cleverly constructed and elegantly written. It's both an engaging human story and a place for wider topical observations. Bring on Spring

If Ali Smith's four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker mid-winter than people often fear

Smith is a specialist by now in using a quizzical, feather-light prose style to interrogate the heaviest of material...throughout Winter, grief and pain are transfigured, sometimes lastingly, by luminous moments of humour, insight and connection... Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen

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

A sparkler...tune in to Spring and Summer to see if art can save the day

Graceful... That trademark mischievous wit and wordplay, a joyful reminder of the most basic, elemental delights of reading ... Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope

A capacious, generous shapeshifter of a novel taking in Greenham Common and Barbara Hepworth, Shakespeare and global migration, it juxtaposes art with nature and protest with apathy, finding surprising alliances in a family riven by feuds. It's a book with Christmas at its heart, in all its familiarity and estrangement: about time, and out of time, like the festival itself

Dazzling second instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet

A book I can't wait to read for Christmas

I would like to be given Winter for Christmas

And now looking forward to [Ali Smith's] Winter

And the book I'd most like to find in my Christmas stocking is Ali Smith's Winter

Finally, under the tree this year I'm hoping to find Ali Smith's Winter

It's a brisk, frosty walk under skies that could open at any moment revealing anything but snow

A book I'd like to be given for Christmas: Winter by Ali Smith

It takes you on a journey through time - Christmases past and present in a Dickensian way, but brings you bang up to the present - how can we live our lives and keep our memories and how do we find the truth? It is uplifting and miraculous with plenty of surprises along the way. It is vintage Smith

"Winter" is an insubordinate folk tale, with echoes of the fiction of Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter... There are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring... [Ali Smith] intends to send a chill up your shanks and she succeeds, jubilantly... Her dialogue is a series of pine cones flung at rosy cheeks

Smith is routinely brilliant, knowing, masterful... The light inside this great novelist's gorgeous snow globe is utterly original, and it definitely illuminates

The only preparation required to savor the Scottish writer Ali Smith's virtuosic "Winter" is to pay attention to the world we've recently been living in...What Smith has achieved in her cycle so far is exactly what we need artists to do in disorienting times: make sense of events, console us, show us how we got here, help us believe that we will find our way through...Smith gives us a potent, necessary source of sustenance that speaks directly to our age...Yet we, like her characters, are past the winter solstice now - the darkest part of the coldest season done. From here on out, we're headed toward the light...It doesn't feel that way, I know. But in the midst of "Winter," each page touched with human grace, you might just begin to believe

Winter is a stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history

Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days...You can trust Smith to snow us once again with her uncanny ability to combine brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art

The stunningly original Smith again breaks every conceivable narrative rule; reflecting her longstanding affinity for Modernism, what she gives us instead is a stylistically innovative cultural bricolage that celebrates the ecstasy of artistic influence.  It demands and richly rewards close attention. [Autumn and Winter] each add to Smith's growing collection of glittering literary paving stones, along a path that's hopefully leading toward the Nobel she deserves. In the interim, we can (re)read "Winter" - and eagerly await the coming of "Spring"

One of the rarest creatures in the world: a really fearless novelist...her prose is melodic, associative, wise, sometimes maddening...'she shares with Mantel and Ishiguro a sense of human caution, a need to understand, a wariness of the high-handedly authorial. All write with the humility of adulthood

The second in Smith's quartet of seasonal novels displays her mastery at weaving allusive magic into the tragicomedies of British people and politics...a bleak, beautiful tale greater than the sum of its references

An engaging novel due to the ecstatic energy of Smith's writing, which is always present on the page

A  sprightly, digressive, intriguing fandango on life and time

These individuals converge to confront each other in the big shabby house, like characters in a Chekhov play. At first, hellish implosion looms. Slowly, erratically, connection creeps in. Lux quietly mediates. Ire softens. Sophia at last eats something. Art resees Nature..."Winter" gives the patient reader a colorful, witty - yes, warming - divertissement

With Iris and Lux as catalysts, scenes from Christmas past unfold, and our narrow views of Sophia and Art widen and deepen, filled with the secrets and substance of their histories, even as the characters themselves seem to expand. As in Sophia's case, for Art this enlargement is announced by a hallucination - "not a real thing," as Lux tells Iris, whose response speaks for the book's own expansive spirit: "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing?"

Winter? Bleak. Earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. But winter makes things visible. And Christmas is a time for family reunions, unexpected guests and evergreen truths. 
 
It's December in Cornwall and Art's mother is seeing things. Art has problems too. His girlfriend has left so he's paying Lux, a young immigrant he found on the street, to impersonate her - but Lux has no intention of sticking to the script. And Iris, Art's prodigal aunt, septuagenarian CND-er and black sheep of the family, is about to arrive with a car full of food and a throat full of protest songs. Four people, strangers and family, in a fifteen-bedroom house for Christmas - will there be enough room for everyone? 
 
Winter casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, art, love and memory, protest and survival.

Autumn

SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017 
 
A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
 'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting' The Times 
 
 Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, 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 . . . 
 
Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. 
 
***** 
 
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 
 
 'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting' The Times 
 
'Bold and brilliant' Observer 
 
'Terrific, extraordinary, playful . . . There is an awful lot to lift the soul' Daily Mail

I love Ali Smith's writing, and I've been keeping Autumn for an end-of-book holiday treat

In a country apparently divided against itself, a writer such as Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians

Bold and brilliant, dealing with the body blow of Brexit to offer us something rare: hope

Humour, grace, solace...A light-footed meditation on mortality, mutability and how to keep your head in troubled times

Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love. It's not so much 'reading between the lines' as being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way

The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith's Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain

Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities

Experimental, thematically complex, associative, time-juggling, powered by a crazed and energetic curiosity

Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting. Long may she Remain that way

A wonderfully risky project...an ambitious, multi-layered creation...an energising and uplifting story

A moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be

I wonder: How does she manage to so wonderfully weave in and out of time, to layer time, while creating something that feels like it was written this morning after she read today's newspaper?

Publisher's description. Autumn 2016: the UK is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. The seasons roll round as ever. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting, light-footed, time-travelling novel. This is a story about right now, this minute; about ageing and time and love and stories themselves. Here comes Autumn.

Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love.  It's not so much 'reading between the lines' as being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way

The book I'd like to receive for Christmas: Ali Smith's Autumn.

Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

Fantastic writing, big ideas and generosity of spirit

[Ali Smith] is Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting - and I can't wait for her new book

Humour, grace, solace...A light-footed meditation on mortality, mutability and how to keep your head in troubled times

Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities

[Ali Smith] is simply incapable of writing a dull paragraph

Bold and brilliant, dealing with the body blow of Brexit to offer us something rare: hope.

The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith's Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain.

Ever-inventive...Autumn is the first serious Brexit novel...In a country apparently divided against itself, a writer such as Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians.

Autumn 2016: Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. And the UK is in pieces, 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. 
Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world filling up with borders, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. From Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, via Keatsian melancholy and the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop Art, this first in a quartet of novels casts an eye over our own time, asking who we are, where we are, right now. 
Here is time, ever-changing, ever cyclical. Here comes Autumn.

Public library and other stories

A richly inventive collection of stories about our enduring love of books from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 
 
 'Smith is dazzling in her daring. Sheer inventive power' Observer 
 
Why are books so powerful? 
What do the books we read make of us? 
And what does the vanishing of public libraries say about us? 
 
 These stories 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 remind us to pay attention to the world we make. 
 
 Public libraries are places of joy, freedom, community and discovery - and they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith raises her voice in defence of our public libraries, celebrating their essential place in our culture and history. 
 
***** 
 
'Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation' Daily Express 
 
'In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone' Scotsman 
 
'Smith's world is incredibly generous - it's a place where all sorts of stories and human connections are possible' Metro

Publisher's description. A story collection from the peerless, multi-award-winning Ali Smith. What do we do with books - and what do they do with us? How do books shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once? And how might they remind us to pay attention to the world we make?

Smith is dazzling in her daring. Sheer inventive power

Ali Smith is a one-off.  Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation

In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

Smith's world is incredibly generous - it's a place where all sorts of stories and human connections are possible

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 remind us to pay attention to the world we make.

Hotel World

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 
 
 A masterful, exuberant novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 
 
 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson 
 
 Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and ambitious book, the brilliant Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. 
 
This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . . 
 
***** 
 
'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open from the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times 
 
 'Hotel World is essential reading from a major talent' Independent

Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe...

How to be Both

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 
 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014 
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD 
 
'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard 
 
 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. 
 
***** 
 
'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph 
 
'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton 
 
'A delight. A masterpiece. Magical' Sunday Times 
 
WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 
 
Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.

Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance

I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul

Exciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers alive

A remarkably easy and immensely enjoyable read... Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation. Both George and Francesco touch the heart and linger in the mind long after the final page.

Smith is the brightest spark in a recent explosion of female novelists taking dizzying risks with form and voice . . . most contemporary male authors feel Jurassic by comparison.

Rich, funny and moving. Smith's writing really catches fire

This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times

Radical, dazzling . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith's re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains

Ali Smith

Praise for Glyph

Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf of our times

Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today

Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf of our times

Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today

Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf of our times

Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today

Books by Ali Smith

Series by Ali Smith

Seasonal Quartet

Articles featuring Ali Smith

A guide to speculative fiction

A day in the life of a book editor with Simon Prosser

20 books everyone should read in their fifties

Why you should always read the epigraph

The best dystopian books of all time

Where to start with Ali Smith

What we learned about writing from Ali Smith’s Penguin Podcast interview

In defence of the exclamation mark!

Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: an oral history

Books to transport you to different places and times

The classics we fell in love with, as chosen by our authors and readers

Ali Smith returns with Spring: ‘We must look to ourselves for hope’

Ali Smith on Autumn, Brexit, and the shortness of life

9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

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