Most Popular Books by Ali Smith

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.)

From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing Set in an uncertain future, where children are recruited by the surveillance state and new boundaries are drawn between people daily, Gliff begins when two siblings, Rose and Briar, are deposited by their mother''s partner, Leif, in an empty house, in a city entirely new to them. Left alone while Leif goes to get their mother, the children must fend for themselves for the first time in their lives, subsisting off canned goods and tentatively venturing into their new surroundings. Their most constant companion a horse they''ve found in the pasture out back, a horse they name Gliff, a horse slated to be taken to the slaughterhouse in a few days. From a Scottish word meaning a "transient moment" or "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, matters more than ever.

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.

“A stimulating combination of literary criticism, essay, and fiction” (The New Yorker) from the incomparable Ali Smith Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world—it is about the things art can do, the things art is made of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. A magical hybrid that refuses 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. Ali Smith’s heady powers as a novelist and short story 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.

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 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2022 “Think of [Companion Piece] as a B-side to the seasonal quartet—more up-to-the-minute observations of our confusing world, more playful language to get lost in.” • ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED BOOKS OF 2022—The National UK, The Guardian, iNews, Financial Times, Daily Mail UK, The Irish Times, Evening Standard, New Statesman, The Scotsman, Waterstones, Book Bar A story is never an answer. A story is always a question. Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms. Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.

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 Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith, Winter is the second novel in her Seasonal Quartet. This much-anticipated follow-up to Autumn is one of the Best Books of the Year from the New York Public Library. “A stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history.” —Time Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art’s mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art’s seeing things himself. When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone? Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.

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

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

In these energetic, exhilarating stories, Ali Smith portrays a world of everyday dislocation, where people nevertheless find connection, mystery, and love. In “Astute Fiery Luxurious,” a fetid misdelivered package throws the life of a couple into disarray. A boy’s mysterious illness in “I Know Something You Don’t Know” drives his mother to seek guidance from homeopathic healers, with inconclusive results. In “The Child,”an unnervingly mature young boy voices offensive humor that genteel society would rather not acknowledge. And a woman meets her fourteen-year-old self but can’t figure out how to guide her--or even whether she should in “Writ.” 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 ae made for each other.

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.

Based on Metaphorphoses by Ovid, this story is "poetic and political, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world"--Flyleaf

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).

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.

A Stylist Magazine (UK) pick for Best New Nonfiction A That Eric Alper pick for My Next Reads 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.

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.

Devastated by the First World War, Chris Guthrie must confront life as a widowed single mother while managing her recently destroyed farm. Sunset Song is a powerful testament to Scotland''s agricultural past and life at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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."

DRAGON. TIGRESS. SHE-DEVIL.For centuries past, and all across the worldHUSSY. SIREN. WENCH.there are words that have defined and decried us.HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE.Words that raise our hacklesVITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT.fire up our blood;FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO.words that tell a storyIn this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up these words and take up their pens, celebrating fifty years of Virago.

Ali Smith''s "beautifully written, precise, poetic" (The Observer) debut that follows the briefly intertwined lives of two young women When we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma-a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by. And then there is Ash, a fiery Scottish actresss who cannot shake her demons-chief among them an unrequited passion for Amy that has obsessed her ever since they met as teenagers. Like is the story of two parallel lives that intersect briefly, then diverge. It is also a timeless evocation of adolescence and its agonizing anticipations, its contradictory yearnings for freedom and safety, its blind quest for mastery over pleasure and pain. Deftly constructed, passionately imagined, Like is a remarkable debut from a powerful talent.