Seasonal Quartet Autumn Winter Spring Summer

From the Man Booker Prize finalist: Seasonal Quartet is a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, which, when taken together, give us something more—all four united by the passing of time, the timing of narrative, and the endless familiarity yet renewal that the cycle of the seasons is. Grounded in current politics, in the work of artists Pauline Boty, Barbara Hepworth, Katherine Mansfield, and Loretta Mazzetti, and in Shakespeare's four final romances The Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles, and A Winter's Tale, the Seasonal Quartet is "one of modern fiction's most elusive and most important undertakings" (Charles Finch, The Boston Globe).

“This is the most political book thus far in this earthy and humane series. Its heart is worn far out on its sleeve. It beats arrhythmically somewhere down near the knuckles….Smith’s vision isn’t fundamentally pessimistic, however. There’s too much squirming life in her fiction, slashes of cleansing light for those who seek it.” - New York Times "Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices."--The Guardian From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and Winter, as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to be both, comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet 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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES AND GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF 2017 Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That’s what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about Autumn 2016? Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdon 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 growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. It is the first installment of her Seasonal quartet—four stand-alone books, seperate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are)—and it casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history making. Here’s where we’re living. Here’s time at its more contemporaneous and its most cyclic. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, a story about aging and time and love and stories themselves.

"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. Often, that's what we lean on the classics for, finding answers in metaphor. But in "Winter," as in "Autumn," Smith gives us a potent, necessary source of sustenance that speaks directly to our age." - The Boston Globe “There are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring.” – The New York Times The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith's essential Seasonal Quartet--from the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be both Shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for Political Writing Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art's mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art's seeing things himself. When four people, strangers and family, converge on a 15 bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone? Winter. It makes things visible. In Ali Smith's Winter, life-force matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shapeshifting novel casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.

WINNER of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction Named a Best Books of the Year by The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, New Statesman, Dazed From the Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn, as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to Be Both, comes the last instalment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet. Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.

"A woman receives an unexpected call from a former classmate asking for help deciphering a puzzling interaction, and from there, Smith spins out a broader story about loneliness, refuge and freedom.” —The New York Times Book Review “Lyrical and timely…Smith’s novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don’t want to.” —TIME A story is never an answer. A story is always a question. A day spent locked in a room by border officials without any explanation as to why. A riddle that seemingly has no answer: curlew or curfew, you choose. A phone call from a college friend who hasn't been in touch in years. And all of it is somehow inextricably linked to the life of a young blacksmith hounded from her trade and branded a vagrant nearly 500 years ago. Award-winning author Ali Smith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. In the hope that our medieval past may unlock the answers we seek to understand our hazy future, Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to Smith's gorgeous canon.

Spring is a deeply moving, lyrical, and inspiring memoir about family, our everyday lives, our joys and struggles, set over the course of a single day. Today is Wednesday the thirteenth of April 2016, it is twelve minutes to eleven, and I have just finished writing this book for you. What happened that summer nearly three years ago, and its repercussions, are long since over. Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for. In Spring, third volume of the Seasons quartet, we follow Karl Ove and his three-month-old daughter, Anna, over the course of one day in April, from sunrise to sunset: a day filled with routine, the beginnings of life and its light, but also its deep struggles and its darkness. In Spring, one of the world's most beguiling literary artists celebrates the greatness of the everyday--the beautiful and the painful--and the big things that hide behind the smallest events in all our lives. Whereas the first two books in Knausgaard's sublime Seasons series are comprised of short texts--sightings of things and places, associations and reflections related to nature and the material world--Spring is a narrative memoir that reads like a short novel. Emotionally captivating, it is the most accessible of all his books for new Karl Ove readers keen to enter into his writing, while also deeply moving for his devoted readers. This beautiful edition is illustrated by the acclaimed Swedish artist Anna Bjerger.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive, and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a novel all about the versatility of art. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation among forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structure gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s “givens” get a second chance.