We've rounded up 20 great books we think everyone should read by 50

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Reading lists

20 books everyone should read in their fifties

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Must-read books by women, as chosen by our readers

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Features

The best quotes from authors in 2021

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Why you should always read the epigraph

A flatlay of the longlisted Penguin titles

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Six Penguin authors on Women’s Prize 2021 longlist

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Where to start with Ali Smith

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What we learned about writing from Ali Smith’s Penguin Podcast interview

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In defence of the exclamation mark!

Books to transport us to other lands and places

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Books to transport you to different places and times

Penguin authors celebrate Margaret Atwood's 80th

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Atwood at 80: How her work shaped the lives of authors and activists

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The book that changed my summer

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The classics we fell in love with, as chosen by our authors and readers

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Ali Smith returns with Spring: ‘We must look to ourselves for hope’

Ali Smith on the post-truth era: ‘There is still a light’

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News

Ali Smith and Mohsin Hamid make the Man Booker Prize 2017 shortlist

Works from Mohsin Hamid, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith selected for Man Booker Prize 2017 longlist

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Ali Smith on Autumn, Brexit, and the shortness of life

Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith

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Extracts

Public Library and other stories by Ali Smith

Free Love

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
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.

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
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 1995 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Like

There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. 
 
Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. 
 
By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths.

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. 
 
Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. 
 
By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 
 
© Ali Smith 1997 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021

Summer

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 meltdown - 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.

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 
 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 
 
 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
 'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' Guardian 
 
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 meltdown - 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. 
 
 Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. 
 
***** 
'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force' Evening Standard 
 
 
'Exquisite. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon 
 
 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times

An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet

The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force that captures the nation's psyche exquisitely

This singular writer has found her moment

A maestra's portrait of her age. . . remarkable

Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance

The bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day's vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer

Smith bring[s] this brilliant quartet to a satisfying close

The final flourish of a mazy and beautiful quartet

The novel's hopeful message about the healing power of friendship ensures the quartet ends on a feel-good note

A remarkable experiment with timeliness in fiction

The Accidental

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.

'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema . . .' 
 
One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely? 
 
'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times 
 
'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer

Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious, exhilaratingly sharp-eyed . . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh

Joyous, a shot across the bows . . . writing as rapture, as giddy delight

An astonishing book - funny and moving, playful and shocking. It is what one hopes for in a modern novel, and yet it confounds all expectations. It is complex. It is beautiful. It is exhilarating. It is fiction at its most artful

A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last

Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention

Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark

'A dazzling hymn to hope’ Observer

Spring

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, 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 tells 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.

SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 
 
 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
 'Her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices' Observer 
 
 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 tells 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. 
 
Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. 
 
***** 
 
'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent 
 
'Smith is a masterful storyteller . . . Savour it' Evening Standard 
 
'Infectious in its energy and warmth' Daily Telegraph

Luminous, generous, hope-filled... The third book in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices... [Ali Smith] is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now

Is there a writer so critically acclaimed and universally beloved? ...Autumn, Winter and Spring are stories of the unlikely connections human beings can make and the cost exacted when those connections are broken. They are state of the nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us: the nation is our choices, our fears, our losses... [Ali Smith] is the national novelist we need in 2019

An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons

Smith is a masterful storyteller... Spring is political but Smith is more concerned with the human fallout of current affairs then the machinations of elites... Through her account of unlikely friendships, Smith brings human values to the fore. Savour it, because there is just one instalment left

Spring weaves a story around the most pressing issues of our time... [A] bubbling, babbling brook of a book...Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to

A powerful vision of lost souls in a divided Britain... As Smith's Seasonal Quartet moves towards completion her own role in British fiction looks ever more vital. The final page proclaims spring 'the great connective'. It's not a bad description of Smith herself

Beguiling... The eagerly awaited third instalment

Infectious in its energy and warmth

Just when things were starting to look really bad, along comes the third instalment in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet to lift us out of the gloom... An extraordinary embodiment of the ways in which storytelling connects us... The work of Katherine Mansfield and Rilke, Greek myths and the propulsive lyricism of spring itself, thread together in narratives of loss and rejuvenation

The third of her exceptional Seasonal quartet, which riffs back and forth with Autumn and Winter to expound on the importance of hope to move us beyond the darkest of times

The most compelling and coherent of the three books... Smith, as always is interested in how a story gets told, and who gets to tell it

Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf of our times.

'Dazzling, luminous, evergreen’ Daily Telegraph

Winter

Winter? Bleak. Earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. But winter makes things visible. And Christmas is a time for family reunions, unexpected guests and evergreen truths. 
 
It's December in Cornwall and Art's mother is seeing things. Art has problems too. His girlfriend has left so he's paying Lux, a young immigrant he found on the street, to impersonate her - but Lux has no intention of sticking to the script. And Iris, Art's prodigal aunt, septuagenarian CND-er and black sheep of the family, is about to arrive with a car full of food and a throat full of protest songs. Four people, strangers and family, in a fifteen-bedroom house for Christmas - will there be enough room for everyone? 
 
Winter casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, art, love and memory, protest and survival.

A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 
 
 Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. 
 
 The world shrinks; the sap sinks. 
 But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. 
 
 In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. 
 
 It's the season that teaches us survival. 
 
 Here comes Winter. 
 
Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now. 
 
***** 
 
'Dazzling . . . Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen' Daily Telegraph 
 
 'Graceful, mischievous, joyful . . . Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope' Independent 
 
 'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit . . . Luminously beautiful' Observer

Cleverly constructed and elegantly written. It's both an engaging human story and a place for wider topical observations. Bring on Spring

If Ali Smith's four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker mid-winter than people often fear

Smith is a specialist by now in using a quizzical, feather-light prose style to interrogate the heaviest of material...throughout Winter, grief and pain are transfigured, sometimes lastingly, by luminous moments of humour, insight and connection... Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen

A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised...Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain... Luminously beautiful

A sparkler...tune in to Spring and Summer to see if art can save the day

Graceful... That trademark mischievous wit and wordplay, a joyful reminder of the most basic, elemental delights of reading ... Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope

A capacious, generous shapeshifter of a novel taking in Greenham Common and Barbara Hepworth, Shakespeare and global migration, it juxtaposes art with nature and protest with apathy, finding surprising alliances in a family riven by feuds. It's a book with Christmas at its heart, in all its familiarity and estrangement: about time, and out of time, like the festival itself

Dazzling second instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet

A book I can't wait to read for Christmas

I would like to be given Winter for Christmas

And now looking forward to [Ali Smith's] Winter

And the book I'd most like to find in my Christmas stocking is Ali Smith's Winter

Finally, under the tree this year I'm hoping to find Ali Smith's Winter

It's a brisk, frosty walk under skies that could open at any moment revealing anything but snow

A book I'd like to be given for Christmas: Winter by Ali Smith

It takes you on a journey through time - Christmases past and present in a Dickensian way, but brings you bang up to the present - how can we live our lives and keep our memories and how do we find the truth? It is uplifting and miraculous with plenty of surprises along the way. It is vintage Smith

"Winter" is an insubordinate folk tale, with echoes of the fiction of Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter... There are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring... [Ali Smith] intends to send a chill up your shanks and she succeeds, jubilantly... Her dialogue is a series of pine cones flung at rosy cheeks

Smith is routinely brilliant, knowing, masterful... The light inside this great novelist's gorgeous snow globe is utterly original, and it definitely illuminates

The only preparation required to savor the Scottish writer Ali Smith's virtuosic "Winter" is to pay attention to the world we've recently been living in...What Smith has achieved in her cycle so far is exactly what we need artists to do in disorienting times: make sense of events, console us, show us how we got here, help us believe that we will find our way through...Smith gives us a potent, necessary source of sustenance that speaks directly to our age...Yet we, like her characters, are past the winter solstice now - the darkest part of the coldest season done. From here on out, we're headed toward the light...It doesn't feel that way, I know. But in the midst of "Winter," each page touched with human grace, you might just begin to believe

Winter is a stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history

Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days...You can trust Smith to snow us once again with her uncanny ability to combine brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art

The stunningly original Smith again breaks every conceivable narrative rule; reflecting her longstanding affinity for Modernism, what she gives us instead is a stylistically innovative cultural bricolage that celebrates the ecstasy of artistic influence.  It demands and richly rewards close attention. [Autumn and Winter] each add to Smith's growing collection of glittering literary paving stones, along a path that's hopefully leading toward the Nobel she deserves. In the interim, we can (re)read "Winter" - and eagerly await the coming of "Spring"

One of the rarest creatures in the world: a really fearless novelist...her prose is melodic, associative, wise, sometimes maddening...'she shares with Mantel and Ishiguro a sense of human caution, a need to understand, a wariness of the high-handedly authorial. All write with the humility of adulthood

The second in Smith's quartet of seasonal novels displays her mastery at weaving allusive magic into the tragicomedies of British people and politics...a bleak, beautiful tale greater than the sum of its references

An engaging novel due to the ecstatic energy of Smith's writing, which is always present on the page

A  sprightly, digressive, intriguing fandango on life and time

These individuals converge to confront each other in the big shabby house, like characters in a Chekhov play. At first, hellish implosion looms. Slowly, erratically, connection creeps in. Lux quietly mediates. Ire softens. Sophia at last eats something. Art resees Nature..."Winter" gives the patient reader a colorful, witty - yes, warming - divertissement

With Iris and Lux as catalysts, scenes from Christmas past unfold, and our narrow views of Sophia and Art widen and deepen, filled with the secrets and substance of their histories, even as the characters themselves seem to expand. As in Sophia's case, for Art this enlargement is announced by a hallucination - "not a real thing," as Lux tells Iris, whose response speaks for the book's own expansive spirit: "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing?"

Ali Smith

The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of How to be both

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet 
 
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 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022

Ali Smith

Companion piece

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