The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022
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
Superb, radical, remarkable -- Mohsin Hamid ― New York Times
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 -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett ― Guardian
Scintillating . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious -- Alex Preston ― Observer
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 ― Financial 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 ― The New Statesman
Alive to the music and light of language ― Washington Post
Smith's work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful ― NPR
Like Smith's other novels, Companion piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements ― Esquire
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 ― Los Angeles Times
