Books by Ali Smith

A Guardian Best Book of the 21st CenturySHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERA breathtakingly inventive new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both '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' Observer 'Humour, grace, solace... A light-footed meditation on mortality, mutability and how to keep your head in troubled times' Guardian'Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love' Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk and The Cost of LivingAutumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.How about Autumn 2016? 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.Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.Here comes Autumn.

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 experiences anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims stories in Chaucers Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

En oktoberdag tager Richard, en desperat ældre filminstruktør, toget fra London til Kingussie. Der møder han Brit, en ung kvinde, der arbejde i et center for illegale migranter og flygtninge. Hun er rejst mod højlandet i selskab med en 12-årig pige. Pigen, der kalder sig Florence, nægter at sige, hvor hun kommer fra, og har en imponerende evne til at få det, hun vil have, og gøre sig usynlig for dem, der står i vejen for hende. Forår er en umulig fortælling om en umulig tid. Ali Smith skriver poetisk og politisk om umenneskelighed, men også om håb og værdighed, som stadig findes. Hun lader forårslyset sive ind. Forår er tredje selvstændige roman i Ali Smiths store årstidskvartet.

Det er et umage venskab, Daniel Gluck og Elisabeth Demand har. Daniel er 101 år gammel, og Elisabeth er 32. I fortællingens nutid, umiddelbart efter Brexit-afstemningen, møder Elisabeth trofast op på det plejehjem, hvor Daniel ligger og venter på at dø. For mange år siden, da de mødtes i 1993, advarede hendes mor hende om at pleje kontakt med den mærkelige nabo, der var flyttet ind over for dem. Men Elisabeth nægter at rette sig efter moderen, og ud af den insisteren på relationer mellem mennesker vokser et venskab, som forfatteren Ali Smith bruger som udgangspunkt for sin fortælling om England af i dag. Efterår er første bog i en kvartet af Ali Smith. Næste udgivelse, Vinter, udkommer i begyndelsen af 2019.

Februar 2020. Voldsomme brande hærger Australien, og man har opdaget en mystisk virus i Kina. I Brighton i Sydengland insisterer den sekstenårige Sacha på, at kloden har problemer. Hendes kværulerende og kyniske lillebror, Robert, er problemer. Moren og faren har problemer, og faren er flyttet sammen med sin unge kæreste i nabohuset.Imens er verden ved at bryde sammen – og det endelige sammenbrud er ikke engang begyndt.Sommer er en roman om store, gennemgribende forandringer. Ali Smith skriver knivskarpt og håbefuldt om en mørk tid, og om mennesker som er i familie, men som ikke kender hinanden. Det er i hvert fald, det de tror. Men hvad er egentlig familie? Og hvad er det de alligevel har til fælles?Sommer er fjerde og sidste bog i forfatterens årstidskvartet. En poetisk, politisk fortælling om samfundet lige nu.

Vinter er en roman om en dysfunktionel jul i en dysfunktionel familie i et dysfunktionelt England i en dysfunktionel verden. Sophie Cleves er vor tids Ebenezer Scrooge. Sur og gammel bor hun i en kæmpe villa og er, som hendes søster Iris noterer sig, typen, der ikke har andet at servere til jul end valnødder og et halvt glas med glaserede kirsebær. Netop julen står for døren i hjemmet med de femten soveværelser, og sønnen Arthur kommer på besøg. Med sig har han den Shakespeare-elskende, kroatiske studerende Lux, som han har samlet op ved et busstoppested og betaler for at spille sin kæreste i helligdagene. Og kort efter ankommer så også Sophies søster, der netop er vendt hjem fra Grækenland, hvor hun har hjulpet migranter i land. Vinter er bog i Ali Smiths kvartet. Den første er Efterår, der udkom i august 2018.

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARDWINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014NOMINATED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening StandardHow 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. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTIONA masterful, exuberant novel from the acclaimed author of How to be both and the ongoing Seasonal quartet 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson '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' IndependentFive 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 . . .

"This story of three men's work helping traumatized kids in one of America's most underserved cities reveals how mindfulness tools can help children and communities not only survive but thrive"--

Full transcript of Ali Smith's Muriel Spark lecture, given in November 2017.

A richly inventive new collection of stories from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED and 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'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' ScotsmanWhy 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 right now 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.

Being short, you might think the story's structure would yield an answer to this question more readily than, say, the novel. But for as long as the short story has been around, arguments have raged as to what it should and shouldn't be made up of, what it should and shouldn't do. Here, 15 leading contemporary practitioners offer structural appreciations of past masters of the form as well as their own perspectives on what the short story does so well. The best short stories don't have closure, argues one contributor, 'because life doesn't have closure'; 'plot must be written with the denouement constantly in view,' quotes another. Covering a century of writing that arguably saw all the major short forms emerge, from Hawthorne's 'Twice Told Tales' to Kafka's modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.

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...

A form-bending and endlessly inventive collection of short stories - from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED and WOMEN'S PRIZE-WINNING author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet'A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form' Independent 'Hurrah for Ali Smith. The best short-story writers make it look as easy as making a cup of tea. Ali Smith is one of these... A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is' The TimesA middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. An innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, we see a narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and a nymph.Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones in equal measure. One-of-a-kind Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

* A definitive collection of 101 short pieces from 1900 to 2000 this is an invaluable volume of women's writing this century

From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet'Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious. . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh' Sunday Telegraph 'A beguiling page-turner... To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last' Independent'Joyous' The TimesThe Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light.A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.

A vitally alive and ever-surprising collection of stories from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED and WOMEN'S PRIZE-WINNING author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet'Bold and sensitive. Smith's prose is a joy' Independent'Captures quiet epiphanies of the extraordinary in the mundane' Sunday Times'These stories fizz with life' The Times Literary Supplement Individually lucid and luminous, these tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, expertly inching us closer to the bone, Ali Smith's storytelling has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous.

A wildly inventive collection of fiction from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED and BAILEYS PRIZE-WINNING author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard

From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet Artful is a revelation; a new kind of book altogether . . . it could have only been written by Ali Smith. An intimate study of grief that makes you glad to be alive Jackie Kay Playful and audacious Independent Powerful and moving London Review of Books Magical... Blending of criticism and fiction, Artful belongs in a genre of its own . . . Joyful for anyone interested in the art of writing, and living, well Anita Sethi, New Statesman Based on four electrifying lectures given by the author at Oxford University, and exploring the explosive connections between art, story, memory and grief - Artful is a tidal wave of ideas to blast away the cobwebs and change how you see the world Narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, Artful slips slyly between fiction and essay, guiding the reader thrillingly through a sequence of ideas on art and literature. With Smiths trademark humour, inventiveness, poignancy and critical insight, this is unique experiment in form, style, life, love, death, immortality and what art can mean.

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