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  • Published: 20 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241973301
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Autumn

SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017




'The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith's Autumn... Expansive, shape-shifting, at once more stringent and more consoling than anything I've read this year' Olivia Laing, Observer

Autumn 2016: Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. And the UK 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.
Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world filling up with borders, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. From Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, via Keatsian melancholy and the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop Art, this first in a quartet of novels casts an eye over our own time, asking who we are, where we are, right now.
Here is time, ever-changing, ever cyclical. Here comes Autumn.

  • Published: 20 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241973301
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Ali Smith

Ali Smith is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, Public library and other stories and Autumn. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

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Praise for Autumn

I love Ali Smith's writing, and I've been keeping Autumn for an end-of-book holiday treat

Val McDermid, 'The Observer'

In a country apparently divided against itself, a writer such as Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians

Financial Times

Bold and brilliant, dealing with the body blow of Brexit to offer us something rare: hope

Jackie Kay

Humour, grace, solace...A light-footed meditation on mortality, mutability and how to keep your head in troubled times

The Guardian

Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love. It's not so much 'reading between the lines' as being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way

Deborah Levy

The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith's Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain

The Observer

Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities

The Guardian

Experimental, thematically complex, associative, time-juggling, powered by a crazed and energetic curiosity

Sunday Times

Pure literary magic

Mail on Sunday

Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting. Long may she Remain that way

The Times

A wonderfully risky project...an ambitious, multi-layered creation...an energising and uplifting story

The Daily Telegraph

A moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be

The New York Times

I wonder: How does she manage to so wonderfully weave in and out of time, to layer time, while creating something that feels like it was written this morning after she read today's newspaper?

PBS News Hour

Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities

The Guardian

Fantastic writing, big ideas and generosity of spirit

Cressida Connolly

Publisher's description. Autumn 2016: the UK is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. The seasons roll round as ever. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting, light-footed, time-travelling novel. This is a story about right now, this minute; about ageing and time and love and stories themselves. Here comes Autumn.

Penguin

She is, of course, Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting

Observer

The first serious Brexit novel

Financial Times

Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, trees and all the dimensions of love

Deborah Levy

Unbearably moving, shrewd and dreamy, playful, strange [and] soulful...[An] assessment of what it means to be alive...Ali Smith has a beautiful mind and where her mind goes, you want to follow...I am struck by, and stuck on, Autumn.

New York Times