ALI SMITH was born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962 and lives in Cambridge, England. She is the author of Autumn, How to be both, There but for the, Artful, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories. Hotel World and The Accidental were both short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
“Autumn is about a long platonic friendship between an elderly
man and a much younger woman. His name is Daniel. He’s 101. . . .
Her name is Elisabeth. She’s a 32-year-old fitfully employed art
lecturer at an unnamed university in London. She comes to read to,
and be with, him. . . . There’s a bit of a Harold and
Maude thing going on here. . . . As Elisabeth and Daniel talk,
and as Elisabeth processes the events of her life, a world
opens. Autumn begins to be about 100 things in addition
to friendship. It’s about poverty and bureaucracy and sex and
morality and music. It includes a long and potent detour into
the tragic life and powerful painting of the British Pop
artist Pauline Boty (1938-66), whose work, Smith makes
plain, should be better known. . . . This is the place to come
out and say it: Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. I found this
book to be unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful
assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time. . . .
Smith is Scottish, and she’s written plays and journalism in
addition to many novels and books of stories. I’ve not read all of
them, though I will. I have no early quibble with the novelist
Sebastian Barry’s comment that she may be ‘Scotland’s Nobel
laureate-in-waiting.’ Autumn has a loose structure,
almost like that of a prose poem. This form is perfect for Smith,
because her mind will go where it wants to go. And where her
mind goes, you want to follow. . . . I suspect that
this shrewd and dreamy, serious-but-not-solemn novel will
be an uncommonly good audiobook, for people who are into that sort
of thing. Spring can really hang you up the most, but for
now I am struck by, and stuck on, Autumn.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[Elisabeth and Daniel] are each other’s favorite people in the
world, even though their paths cross only intermittently and he is
69 years old than she is. . . . Their extraordinary friendship
forms the moral center of this beautiful, subtle work, the seventh
novel by Smith, who consistently produces some of Britain’s most
exciting, ambitious and moving writing. . . . Smith teases out big
ideas so slyly and lightly that you can miss how artfully she goes
about it. . . . Smith’s writing is fearless and nonlinear,
exploring the connectivity of things: between the living and the
dead, the past and the present, art and life. She conveys time
almost as it if is happening all at once, like Picasso trying to
record an image from every angle simultaneously. . . . Smith’s
writing is light and playful, deceptively simple, skipping along
like a stone on the surface of a lake, brimming with humanity and
bending, despite everything, toward hope. . . . ‘Whoever makes up
the story makes up the world,’ Daniel says at one point, ‘so always
try to welcome people into the home of your story.’ That’s what
Smith does, all the time, tries to welcome people in. The best
parts in Autumn, the most moving parts, the transcendent
parts, come during Elisabeth and Daniel’s conversations about
words, art, life, books, the imagination, how to observe, how to
be. Theirs is a conversation that begins mid-paragraph and never
ends.”
—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times Book Review
“’All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All
across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across
the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the
country, people felt they’d really won.’ That might sound like
present-second America, but it’s actually Scottish novelist Ali
Smith—with a leg up from Dickens—describing post-Brexit Britain
in Autumn, the first of a planned quartet of season-based
novels. Smith is well known for taking an elastic approach to
words. Here, she extends that courtesy to time itself. . . .
Layered, resonant, and wittily clever, Autumn confirms
that Smith is a novelist for our time—‘time’ meaning at least the
next four years.”
—Emily Donaldson, The Toronto Star
“With customary intrepidness, the celebrated Scottish author of
several previous books of fiction raises questions about aging, the
elasticity of friendship, aesthetic politics, and the meaning of
fame. . . . Like any successful novel of ideas, Autumn doesn’t
end; it reverberates in one’s bones, recalling Eugenio Montale’s
argument in The Second Life of Art, that the power of a book,
painting, dance, or any art form is not a culminating catharsis but
a recurring echo. Thus Smith’s autumnal leaves cling to trees as
the questions and quandaries linger. . . . Autumn shimmers with
wit, melancholy, grief, joy, wisdom, small acts of love and,
always, wonder at the seasons.”
—Valerie Miner, The Boston Globe
“If authors can be seasonal, then Scottish writer Ali Smith is, to
my mind, a summer novelist. Her fiction, even when it depicts
upsetting events, has an Arcadian atmosphere reminiscent of As
You Like It, as if her characters were wandering through a
green glade on a sunny day. . . . Psychological complexity is not a
hallmark of Smith’s work, but its buoyancy and charm more than make
up for that. In Britain, Smith has won the Whitbread, the
Goldsmiths, and the Costa prizes, and has been shortlisted for the
Man Booker three times. American readers ought to be better
acquainted with her genius. . . . Smith knows how to tease the
glory out of the most plainspoken English. . . . Smith’s literary
spirit is essentially playful, and in Autumn it finds its
counterpart in a little-known (but real) painter of the Pop Art
period, Pauline Boty. . . . Boty was beautiful and fearless, a
free spirit who dabbling in acting and, as Elisabeth sees it, had
the rare ability to represent female pleasure and joy on canvas. .
. . You can see why Smith thinks of the painter as a kindred
spirit. . . . Autumn’s most daring formal move is to attempt
the immediacy of journalism, depicting the national mood while the
nation is still feeling it. . . . ‘That’s the thing about things,’
reads the novel’s second sentence. ‘They fall apart, always have,
always will, it’s in their nature.’ But Autumn hopes to
remind us that’s as true of the bad things as it is of the good. .
. . At first Smith’s choice to start with autumn seemed out of
character, but of course that means that this ambitious four-novel
sequence will end with summer and Smith in her element. If we are
all very lucky, perhaps the world will catch up with her there,
too.”
—Laura Miller, Slate
“The stunning Autumn is the first of a projected quartet of
seasonal novels by Scottish author Ali Smith. . . . Set in the
factional, jingoistic post-Brexit United Kingdom—where ‘what had
happened whipped about itself as if a live electric wire had
snapped off a pylon in a storm’—Autumn is a compact story of the
unlikely friendship of two neighbors: Daniel, an iconoclastic old
man with a house full of art, books and music, and Elisabeth, an
impressionable, lonely young woman, 70 years his junior. . . . If
fall is the twilight of the year, what will Smith's long cold
winter bring—and better yet, her spring and summer? . . . A
triumphant story of a May-December friendship within a divided
Britain.”
—Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness
“What kind of art will come out of this moment? If Ali
Smith’s Autumn is a harbinger of things to come, the work
that emerges over the next decade will be extraordinarily rich. The
novel, the first book in a quartet inspired by the seasons,
considers post-Brexit Britain at the tail end of last summer,
experienced through the perspective of a 32-year-old art history
lecturer named Elisabeth. But its ambition and craft allude to—and
cite—great works of literature, from Brave New
World to The Tempest. Through Smith’s dazzling, whimsical
feats of imagination, a news cycle described by Elisabeth as
‘Thomas Hardy on speed’ becomes the backdrop for a modernist
interrogation of history.
Autumn, like Smith’s last book, How to Be Both, is a
gorgeously constructed puzzle that challenges the reader to solve
it, with a narrative that darts back and forth in time and space. .
. . As the novel proceeds, she layers together fragments of books
and paintings and song lyrics in an act of literary decoupage, as
if to mimic the fragile patchwork of national identity. . . . The
work Autumn seems most indebted to is T.S.
Eliot’s Four Quartets, poems that are also structured loosely
around the seasons, and in which nature has a symbolic power.
Eliot, like Smith, considers time as a flexible entity, with memory
a guiding force that allows people to find divine meaning in the
universe. And Four Quartets, like Autumn, was written
amid great national turmoil, during World War Two. But Smith has a
kind of irrepressible sense of joy that peeks out through the
darkness. . . . Smith, in reckoning with the catastrophe and
wreckage of a fraught historical moment, picks through it just as
precisely to reveal the beauty and the humanity buried deep below
the surface.”
—Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“The first of a projected quartet, Autumn hovers around the season
of harvest and final things, but the possibility of transformation
is also very much in the air. . . . A novel that, under all its
erudition, narrative antics, wit and wordplay, is a wonder of deep
and accommodating compassion.”
—Ellen Akins, The Washington Post
“Smith’s novel plays an intimate melody against a broader
dissonance, probing the friendship between an art historian and an
aging songwriter as they grapple with personal predicaments and a
perilous world.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
"Could Scottish writer Ali Smith be J.D. Salinger's natural
heir? It's not as preposterous as it sounds. Not since
Salinger's plucky English orphan, Esmé, soothed an American
sergeant's no-longer-intact faculties at the end of World War II
has a writer so artfully and heartrendingly captured the
two-way lifeline between preternaturally wise children (mainly
girls) and young-at-heart gentle souls (mainly men) who forge
special friendships that have nothing predatory or Lolita-ish about
them. . . . Autumn again knits together an astonishing
array of seemingly disparate subjects, including mortality,
unconventional love, Shakespeare's Tempest, a rhyming
advertisement jingle, and the xenophobia underlying both Nazism and
current populist neo-nationalism. . . . Smith is better at
making tight connections than most airlines. . . . Free
spirits and the lifeforce of art—along with kindness, hope, and a
readiness 'to be above and beyond the foul even when we're up to
our eyes in it'—are, when you get down to it, what Smith champions
in this stirring novel."
—Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Delights in puns and lyric reveries. For a book about decline and
disintegration, Autumn remains irrepressibly hopeful
about life, something ‘you worked to catch, the intense happiness
of an object slightly set apart from you.’”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“I find reason for excitement when Ali Smith, with thirteen titles
to her credit and numerous awards and honors, brings out a new
work. A Scot now residing in London, she doesn’t write ‘state of
Britain’ novels. She is too subtle for that, but her work is
clearly responsive to social and political issues. ‘The first
post-Brexit novel,’ some critics have called her latest
work, Autumn. Indeed, the fact of the referendum, the emotions
it raised, and the sense of ending—or beginning—that accompanied
the vote run at times as a litany, lists of hopes or complaints, in
a recitation of divisive uncertainty. What is certain is, as the
title asserts, that a cycle is unfolding: winter seems to lie
ahead. But the novel has aspects that subvert that fear. . . . The
surprises abound in the novel, but the mood is balanced,
reflective, mature. The prose styles vary, structure reflecting the
hectic turns of public feeling, the abrupt shifts in time and mood.
. . . But in inverse proportion to defeat is the great
pleasure of the reading. Smith’s prose is seductively simple,
beguiling, its effects hard-won.”
—Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal
“[Smith’s] risk-taking, convention-defying fiction resembles a
dizzying high-wire act performed above stiffer
competition. Autumn is another breathless feat. . . . It
engages acutely and beautifully with topical concerns and perennial
issues. . . . Smith muses on art, literature and memory, plus the
transience of life and the horror of Brexit. Some of her
meditations are imbued with autumnal tones and textures
(melancholy, regret, nostalgia); others are flecked with wit. As
ever, Smith regales us with endless wordplay. . . . Smith's most
substantial components speak volumes with poetic intensity and
lucidity about an enduring companionship, a fractured Great
Britain, the tragedy of aging and the cyclical nature of time. . .
. Autumn is the first installment of Smith's ‘Seasonal’
quartet. If this brilliantly inventive and ruminative book is
representative of what is to come, then we should welcome Smith's
winter chill whatever the season.”
—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Hums with life. . . . [Smith] is indeed a writer in her
prime. Autumn is clever and invigorating. The promise of
three more books to come is something to be savored.”
—Claire Hopley, The Washington Times
“In her new novel, the always intriguing Ali Smith portrays an odd
friendship between a centenarian and the neighbor girl—now a young
woman—he cared for in her childhood. Smith blends conventional
realist narrative with passages that read almost like prose poems
to create an elegiac story that’s decidedly more than the sum of
its parts. . . . [Autumn] offers a piercing view of an
unsettled England in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote. . . .
Much of this novel’s pleasure flows from Smith’s supple prose. She
indulges in word play with an almost Joycean zest.”
—Harvey Freedenberg, BookPage
“[A] vision of post-Brexit England. . . . Ekphrasis permeates the
novel Autumn, which itself seeks to capture in words the
fading, abstract beauty of that ‘season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness,’ as Romantic poet John Keats wrote in his ode To
Autumn. . . . [Smith’s] novel is marked with quiet, brave notes of
hope.”
—Olivia Ho, The Straits Times
“Smith dances across dreamscape, memory, and reality in a novel by
turns funny, touching, and fascinating—in terms of character and of
history. The rare friendship of an old man and a young girl whose
father has vanished (and whose mother disappears more than
occasionally) becomes a vessel for salvation as her life is newly
graced with love and with meaning. Old he may be but as she grows
toward adulthood, her life infinitely enriched by the years spent
with her highly cultured friend, his journey takes him back to the
ghosts of his past, forward toward the darkening reality of the
present world and of the world beyond. Trumpworld in America has
nothing on the unpleasant present in England but Smith’s light
touch, transcendent imagination and never-cloying compassion
transport us beyond the threat of evil and of old age, reminding us
(thank God) of history’s arc and of our own humanity. Each of
Smith’s novels is a wonder; Autumn is beyond
wonderful.”
—Betsy Burton, The King’s English, Salt Lake City, UT
“This splendid free-form novel—the first in a seasonally themed
tetralogy—chronicles the last days of a lifelong friendship between
Elisabeth, a British university lecturer in London, and her former
neighbor, a centenarian named Daniel. Opening with an oblique,
dreamy prologue about mortality, the novel proper sets itself
against this past summer’s historic Brexit vote. . . . Smith deftly
juxtaposes her protagonists’ physical and emotional states in the
past and present, tracking Elisabeth’s path from precocity to
disillusionment. Eschewing traditional structure and punctuation,
the novel charts a wild course through uncertain terrain, an
approach that excites and surprises in equal turn. . . . Smith,
always one to take risks, sees all of them pay off yet again.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith’s new novel is the
charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who
offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small
pleasures is enthusiastically recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of
this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection. .
. . Smith has a gift for drawing a reader into whatever world she
creates. . . . [Autumn is] compelling in its emotional and
historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and
loss.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“It is undoubtedly Smith at her best. . . . This book sets Smith’s
complex creative character in stone: puckish yet elegant, angry but
comforting. Long may she Remain that way.”
—Melissa Katsoulis, The Times (London)
“Like Smith’s previous novels, Autumn is an ambitious,
multi-layered creation. . . . Smith is convincing as both a
12-year-old girl proud of her new rollerblades and a man living in
a care home. . . . The story is rooted in autumn, and Smith writes
lyrically about the changing seasons. . . . An energising and
uplifting story.”
—Susannah Butter, Evening Standard
“Smith writes in a liltingly singsong prose that fizzes with
exuberant punning and wordplay. . . . One stylistic device in
particular stands out: a propensity for lengthy monologues, almost
soliloquies, in which a certain word or phrase is repeated over and
over, producing a rhetorically powerful rhythmic effect. . . .
[Autumn’s] patchwork aesthetic speaks to something authentic in the
way many of us will have experienced not only the political crisis
of the past few months—as consumers of online news media—but much
else besides, as readers, watchers and listeners in the digital
ecology. That sense of fragmentation and intertextual riffing,
presaged in Boty’s collages, is writ large in the remix dynamic of
online cultural consumption, and it is this, as much as Smith’s
energetic, vibrant prose and topical setting, that makes it feel so
compellingly contemporary. Nevertheless Autumn will
primarily draw attention, and rightly so, for its appeal to
conscience and common humanity—intergenerational, interracial,
international—in these deeply worrying times.”
—Houman Barekat, The Irish Times
“Proving Smith's ambition and scope, Autumn is the first
in a four-part series (the other titles will be Spring, Winter and
Summer). . . . If the first instalment is anything to go by, the
series is destined to become a canon classic. . . . This is the
first novel, to my mind, to significantly address post-Brexit
Britain. . . . That Smith has done so with such impressive sleight
of hand, and with such expediency, is incredible. . . . As
Daniel notes: ‘Time travel is real. We do it all the time, moment
to moment.’ This, ultimately, is the backbone of the book. As
concepts go, it's simple, but a brilliant and breathtaking
one.”
—Tanya Sweeney, The Irish Independent
“Uplifting and satirical. . . . A beautiful meditation. . . . The
relationships and people . . . are really special. Elisabeth Demand
is a thirtysomething lecturer in London with a wryly detached view
of the modern world. It is the time she spends with 101-year-old
former neighbour Daniel Gluck, both in the present and the past,
that really hits home—their strange companionship giving Smith the
chance to muse on the nature of love, art, life and, well, what the
referendum has done to Britain. . . . Given this is the first of a
quintet of season-based novels that explore time, Winter can’t come
soon enough. Smith is at the very peak of her powers.”
—Ben East, The National (Arts & Life)
“Already acknowledged as one of the most inventive novelists
writing in Britain today, with her new novel, Autumn, Ali
Smith also proves herself to be one of the country’s foremost
chroniclers, her finger firmly on the social and political
pulse. . . . In Autumn time is something the warp
and weft of which can be bent on a whim: past, present and strange
timeless limbos exist alongside each other. . . . One of the
delights of her work is its down to earth realism. . .
. Autumn displays much of the mischievous innovation that
defines Smith’s writing.”
—Lucy Scholes, The Independent (London)
“A free-floating meditation on time, memory and the transience of
existence, in which ideas swirl round like fallen leaves. . . . As
always Smith is witty. . . . Laugh-out-loud funny. . . . [But]
also dense with allusions and insights into our current
malaise. . . . Teem[s] with interesting language, images and
ideas.”
—Dana Garavelli, The National
“Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams
and transient realities; the ‘endless sad fragility’ of mortal
lives.”
—Joanna Kavenna, The Guardian (London)
“Impressionistic and intricate. . . . The first serious Brexit
novel. . . . Smith is brilliant on what the referendum has done to
Britain, the fissures that have appeared in the semi-rural
landscape of her mother’s East Anglian home. . . . At once sardonic
and heartbreaking. . . . I can think of few writers—Virginia Woolf
is one, James Salter another—so able to propel a narrative through
voice alone. Smith’s use of free indirect discourse, the
close-third-person style that puts the reader at once within and
without her characters, means that Autumn, for all its
braininess, is never difficult. Smith feels like a genial guide
leading us through a torrent of ideas—about art, history,
literature, feminism, memory. This is a novel that works by
accretion, appearing light and playful, surface-dwelling, while all
the time enacting profound changes on the reader’s heart. In a
country apparently divided against itself, a writer such as Smith,
who makes you feel known, who seems to speak to your own private
weirdnesses, is more valuable than a whole parliament of
politicians.”
—Alex Preston, Financial Times
“[a novel] very much of our time, grappling with societies in the
midst of apocalyptic change and trying to imagine what might come
next.”
–The Spinoff
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