Smith captures the permeable border between the present and memory, the ability we all have to time travel where we sit, which feels all too familiar to me six months into a quarantine with no clear end. The two don’t speak so much as meet in one another’s imaginations. Impending loss hovers over the novel: Daniel isn’t just trapped in a nightmare, he’s trapped in his own body, confined to a bed in a care facility where Elisabeth comes to visit him. Time just passed… It was a kind of relief.” “Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy,” she writes. She’s more interested in sustaining a mood, and specifically the sense of impending loss that comes with the year turning towards its end. Even though this one isn’t run by Louis DeJoy, its service is still sub-optimal.įirst published in 2016 the book unfolds in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, which honestly feels like decades ago at this point, but Smith mostly keeps the churning anxieties of those early days of disaster at the margins, limited to outbursts on radio shows and moments of doom scrolling, “Go Home” signs on fences and a suddenly outdated EU marking in a new passport. Autumn begins with both of its main characters in limbo, which has some uncanny resonances with our pandemic present: Daniel, a centenarian, finds himself in a literal nightmare while Elisabeth, a 32-year-old adjunct, is trapped by the more bureaucratic snags of the Post Office. It feels like a decidedly Smith-ian touch, both absurd and sad, that some of the damage is traced to a device set off at a gender reveal party. The day I open the first book in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, smoke from the wildfires ravaging the West Coast reach Chicago. 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series.

Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon 'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force' Evening Standard Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?ĭiscover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. They're family, but they think they're strangers. This is a story about people on the brink of change. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.

Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. Their mother and father are having trouble. In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021Ī 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.

Ali smith autumn winter spring summer