MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • The first novel in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love—and stories themselves.
Autumn. 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
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ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
'Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, and all the dimensions of love. It's a case not so much of reading between the lines as of being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way' Deborah Levy on Autumn
'Humour, grace, solace...A light-footed meditation on mortality, mutability and how to keep your head in troubled times' ― Guardian, Best Fiction 2016
'Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities' ― Guardian
'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.' ― Olivia Laing, Observer
