Autumn: A Novel (Seasonal Quartet)

Author: Smith Ali

Brand: Anchor

Color: Tan

Edition: Reprint

Number Of Pages: 288

Details: Product Description

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • The first novel in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love—and stories themselves.

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984—look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands 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.

A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, 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. Autumn is wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories.

Review

A Washington Post Notable Book• One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The New York Times, Martha Kearney/The Guardian, Slate, Chicago Tribune, Southern Living, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, The Morning News, Kirkus Reviews •Long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize

“Beautiful, subtle. . . . Brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Shimmers with wit, melancholy, grief, joy, wisdom, small acts of love and, always, wonder at the seasons.” —The Boston Globe

“Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. [Autumn is] unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time.” —The New York Times

“Bliss from beginning to end. . . . However stormy the events and themes of Smith’s work, their presiding spirit is sunny, witty, and expansive.” —Laura Miller, Slate

“A wonder of deep and accommodating compassion.” —The Washington Post

“Gorgeously constructed. . . . Smith has a kind of irrepressible sense of joy.” —The Atlantic

“Knits together an astonishing array of seemingly disparate subjects. . . . Free spirits and the lifeforce of art—along with kindness, hope, and a readiness ‘to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it’—are, when you get down to it, what Smith champions in this stirring novel.” —NPR

“[A] masterwork on the post-Brexit world. . . . Impressionistic and deeply personal.” —New York

“Smith’s novel plays an intimate melody against a broader dissonance, probing the friendship between an art historian and an aging songwriter as they grapple with personal predicaments and a perilous world.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Delights in puns and lyric reveries. For a book about decline and disintegration, Autumn remains irrepressibly hopeful about life, something ‘you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you.’” —The Wall Street Journal

“Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities; the ‘endless sad fragility’ of mortal lives.” —The Guardian (London)

“If Ali Smith’s four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of artistic responses to “this mad and bitter mess” of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker midwinter than people often fear.” – Financial Times

“In Britain, Smith has won the Whitbread, the Goldsmiths, and the Costa prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker three times. American readers ought to be better acquainted with her genius. . . . This ambitious four-novel sequence will end with summer and Smith in her element. If we are all very lucky, perhaps the world will catch up with her there, too.” —Slate

“Smith’s voice, so wise and joyful, is the perfect antidote to troubled times: raw and bitter in the face of injustice, yet always alive to hope, however slight – like the buddleia that blossomed in the wreckage of cities after the Second World War, calmly continuing its own natural cycle oblivious to human destruction.” – New Statesman

“Smith regales us

Release Date: 17-10-2017

Package Dimensions: 23x203x295