Most Popular Books by Ali Smith

Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author''s trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts—parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid—encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to see their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s narrative freedom and exhilarating facility with language propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.

The fourth novel in the Seasonal Quartet by Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith is “a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke, and seizing the moment” (The New York Times). In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdownu00ad—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common? Summer.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of the bestselling Hotel World comes this stunning collection of stories set in a world of everyday dislocation, where people nevertheless find connection, mystery, and love. These tales are of ordinary but poignant beauty: at the pub, strangers regale each other with memories of Christmases past; lovers share tales over dinner about how they met, their former lovers, and each other; a woman even tells a story to her fourteen-year-old self. As Smith explores the subtle links between what we know and what we feel, she creates an exuberant, masterly collection that is packed full of ideas, humor, nuance, and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author comes a collection of uniquely inventive stories that thread the labyrinth of coincidence, chance, and connections missed and made. What happens when you run into Death in a busy train station? (You know he’s Death because when he smiles, your cell phone goes dead.) What if your lover falls in love with a tree? Should you be jealous? From the woman pursued by a band of bagpipers in full regalia to the artist who’s built a seven-foot boat out of secondhand copies of The Great Gatsby, Smith’s characters are offbeat, charming, sexy, and as wonderfully complex as life itself.

From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse. From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art''s versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take. "Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century How to be both is 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. A NOTE TO THE READER: Who says stories reach everybody in the same order? This novel can be read in two ways, and the eBook provides you with both. You can choose which way to read the novel by simply clicking on one of two icons—CAMERA or EYES. The text is exactly the same in both versions; the narratives are just in a different order. The ebook is produced this way so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which icon you select, the book will read: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. (Your friend may be reading it the other way around.) Enjoy the adventure. (Having both versions in the same file is intentional.)

"A woman receives an unexpected call from a former classmate asking for help deciphering a puzzling interaction, and from there, Smith spins out a broader story about loneliness, refuge and freedom.” —The New York Times Book Review “Lyrical and timely…Smith’s novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don’t want to.” —TIME A story is never an answer. A story is always a question. A day spent locked in a room by border officials without any explanation as to why. A riddle that seemingly has no answer: curlew or curfew, you choose. A phone call from a college friend who hasn''t been in touch in years. And all of it is somehow inextricably linked to the life of a young blacksmith hounded from her trade and branded a vagrant nearly 500 years ago. Award-winning author Ali Smith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. In the hope that our medieval past may unlock the answers we seek to understand our hazy future, Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to Smith''s gorgeous canon.

When Miles Garth locks himself in an upstairs room during a dinner party and communicates only through notes slipped under the door, his involuntary hosts beg help from childhood friend Anna, who is unwittingly thrust into the family''s surreal world. By the Whitbread Award-winning author of The Accidental.

Girl meets boy. It''s a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances?Ali Smith''s re-mix of Ovid''s most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can''t be bottled and sold.It''s about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.''I love Ali Smith''s work.''Jeanette Winterson, The Times''An extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around.''Carol Birch, Independent

BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.

A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.

Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate. Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.

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 . . . ''A beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities'' Guardian ''Bravura, brilliant and unsettling . . . leaving you marvelling'' Financial Times ''Fantastic'' Spectator ''A terrific writer. There is an awful lot to lift the soul, not least Smith''s extraordinary playful use of language'' Daily Mail ''Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting'' The Times ''Bold and brilliant'' Observer ''Smith straddles the elegiac and the celebratory through this glorious novel'' Scotsman

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020 What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare''s most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we''re living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

A collection of short stories that share the same theme of examining the distances and connections between people.

From the Man Booker Prize finalist: Seasonal Quartet is a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, which, when taken together, give us something more—all four united by the passing of time, the timing of narrative, and the endless familiarity yet renewal that the cycle of the seasons is. Grounded in current politics, in the work of artists Pauline Boty, Barbara Hepworth, Katherine Mansfield, and Loretta Mazzetti, and in Shakespeare''s four final romances The Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles, and A Winter''s Tale, the Seasonal Quartet is "one of modern fiction''s most elusive and most important undertakings" (Charles Finch, The Boston Globe).

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith’s coming of age in ’90s New York as she commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply. As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents’ toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to. She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world—from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She’s often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny—all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact. Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the ’90s music scene—alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative—as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author: Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we’ve read over our lives—our own personal libraries—make of us? What does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection 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. Woven between the stories are conversations with writers and readers reflecting on the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. At a time when public libraries around the world face threats of cuts and closures, this collection stands as a work of literary activism—and as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.

We live with the idea of sin every day – from the greatest transgressions to the tiniest misdemeanours. But surely the concept was invented for an age where divine retribution and eternal punishment dominated the collective consciousness? In this lively collection of new writing, Nicola Barker, Dylan Evans, David Flusfeder, Todd McEwen, Martin Rowson, John Sutherland and Ali Smith go head to head with the capital vices to explore what we really mean when we talk about sin. The resulting mixture of erudite and playful essays and startling new fiction might not make you a better person, but it will certainly give you pause for thought when you’ re next laying the law down or – heaven forfend – about to do something beyond the pale yourself.

Medardo Fraile, born in Madrid in 1925, is considered to be one of Spain''s finest short-story writers. The collection Cuentos de verdad (on which this anthology is based), won him the 1965 Premio Nacional de la Crítica. While his stories have appeared in translation in other story collections, this is the first complete anthology of his work to appear in English Like Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, Medardo Fraile is a chronicler of the minor tragedies and triumphs of ordinary life, and each short tale opens up an entire exquisite world.

Ali Smith''s Supersonic 70s collects together some of Ali Smith''s best writing of the last ten years and also includes a brand new story.

"A re-imagining of the wonderfully bonkers, truly innovative and still very much culturally relevant Don Quixote. With newly commissioned photography by Jacob Robinson and beautiful design by Fraser Muggeridge, here we champion the book for its progressive fantasy-laden story and collapsible narrative and celebrate Don Quixote as a contemporary classic cultural object." -- Publisher''s website.

Now there''s a girl who understands things, the crow thought. When two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, die in a vicious battle over the crown of Thebes, the new ruler, King Creon, decides that Eteocles will be buried as a hero, while Polynices will be left outside as a feast for the dogs and crows. But the young Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, will defy the cruel tyrant and attempt to give her brother the burial he deserves. This simple act of love and bravery will set in motion a terrible course of events that will reverberate across the entire kingdom... Dave Eggers says, of the series: "I couldn''t be prouder to be a part of it. Ever since Alessandro conceived this idea I thought it was brilliant. The editions that they''ve complied have been lushly illustrated and elegantly designed."