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. 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.

It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the. Autumnis wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories.

Smith feels like a genial guide leading us through a torrent of ideas - about art, history, literature, feminism, memory. 527 quotes from Ali Smith: It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. 527 quotes from Ali Smith: because looking is just the start of understanding, just its surface, the top layer of any understanding, the girl is saying. 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. I can think of few writers - Virginia Woolf is one, James Salter another - so able to propel a narrative through voice alone. Wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, Autumn is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love-and stories themselves. Smith is brilliant on what the referendum has done to Britain, the fissures that have appeared. 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. the relationship between Elisabeth and Daniel is partly a beacon held up against the darkness that falls in the wake of the vote. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic. What grips the reader is the way that Smith draws us deeper into Elisabeth’s world. This splendid free-form novelE28094the first in a seasonally themed tetralogyE28094chronicles the last days of a lifelong. Autumn is a novel of ideas, and plot isn’t the reason we keep turning the pages.

Autumn ali smith goodreads