We then learn of the two main characters and how they met. It certainly reflects the limbo we all feel right now as we wait to see what will happen next. Perhaps a reference to the sense of isolation people are feeling in the current climate, and also the sense of being other in a world that is feeling less inclusive than before. There is a sense that neither of them is sure of who they are, or where they are going. At the same time a young woman is waiting in the Post Office to renew her passport, but her turn never seems to come. He isn’t sure how old he is but feels as if his body is younger than he was before.
He is naked and lost, and becomes aware of people he vaguely knows passing him by. 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.
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