Ali Smith

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Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Scottish Stories

Free Love

Reunion

Like

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021

Summer

The Accidental

'A dazzling hymn to hope’ Observer

Spring

Winter

SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017

Autumn

Public library and other stories

Hotel World

How to be Both

Love Quarrels from Anton Chekhov to ZZ Packer

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Artful

There but for the

The First Person and Other Stories

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The Member of the Wedding

Sunset Song

Companion piece

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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

Scintillating . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious

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

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

Smith's work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful

Like Smith's other novels, Companion piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements

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

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

'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.'

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 was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Companion piece

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

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Superb, radical, remarkable

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

Scintillating . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious

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

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

Alive to the music and light of language

Smith's work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful

Like Smith's other novels, Companion piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements

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

About Ali Smith

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