The novel opens with a man washed ashore. It’s beautifully written and leaves you feeling really quite meloncholy at times. There’s a subtly to it – the graffiti on a neighbour’s wall, the electric fence that appears near where the characters live.

There is a real sense of the aftermath of Brexit in this novel, without it ever feeling like you’re being hit over the head with it all over again. It’s written in a literal sense but also metaphorically to mimic what is happening politically at the moment.

This book is simply stunning! I think it may be my new favourite by Ali Smith and is a real contender to be my book of 2016.Īli Smith captures the way autumn feels – the drift away from the warm summer and the move towards winter. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.Īutumn is the first installment in Ali Smith’s novel quartet Seasonal: four standalone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative.įrom 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. A breathtakingly inventive new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be bothįusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art – via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery – Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past.

Autumn ali smith review