That’s not to say that her work is perfect. She’s a great writer, quite possibly bound for a Nobel Prize 20 years ago it seemed certain that Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan had lapped the field, but assess again today and it’s instead Hilary Mantel and Smith (gay, working class, and by way of Inverness rather than a posh public school, for what it’s worth) who seem the most consequential British novelists of their generation. If she were even an ounce less talented it would fall apart. This is Smith’s method in the seasonal quartet: to force the timely and the timeless together, like the wrong ends of two magnets. At the same time, though, Smith uses these events as a launch to glide up into thinner air, particularly long meditations on art and time, her twin obsessions - including, in this book, reflections on Einstein, “A Winter’s Tale,” the filmmaker Lorena Mazzetti, and swifts, subjects she explores with the poet’s constant willingness to break forward in the direction of a new idea. As she planned from the start, the characters in “ Summer” seem uncannily contemporaneous, agonizing over COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd. remarkable' Guardian.Smith is a gifted storyteller - the whole quartet is highly readable - but story is only half the point of her work. Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series. 'The first great corona virus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force that captures the nation's psyche exquisitely' Evening Standard So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer.
They're family, but they think they're strangers. This is a story about people on the brink of change.
In the past, a lovely summer.Ī different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. Their mother and father are having trouble. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. All four installments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer 'Exquisite. Discover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force cycle of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right now. WINNER of THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 LONG-LISTED for THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 and the HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE.Ģ020 Book of the Year according to the Spectator, TLS, New Statesman and Financial Times.
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