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Ali Smith

Friday 17th May 2019

Venue
Topping & Company Booksellers of St Andrews, 7 Greyfriars Garden, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9HG
Doors Open
7.40pm
Start Time
8pm
Ali-Smith-Web.jpg

Please note that this event will now be held at the Bookshop. 

‘Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, and all the dimensions of love. It’s a case not so much of reading between the lines as of being blinded by the light between the lines – in a good way’ – Deborah Levy

Described by Sebastian Barry as ‘Scotland’s Nobel Laureate-in-waiting’, Ali Smith is a wonder to behold. Her novels and short stories have come to represent the best of Scotland’s modern literature to the world. Her list of prizes and honours are many – among them she holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of St Andrews – and each new work solidifies her status as a true master of the craft. Her writing style is innovative and literary, but lucid and utterly-compelling, a rare feat from a writer of literary fiction. Ali writes books that one can simply slip into and read in a long, ecstatic, unforgettable journey.

We are delighted to welcome Ali back to the bookshop, to launch the next instalment in her remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet – Spring:

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.

Spring  is the perfect novel, and promises to delight lovers of Smith’s work, or those that have yet to be enthralled.

‘A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised… Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain… Luminously beautiful’ – Observer on Winter

‘Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant… Combining brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art’ – NPR on Winter

 

To pre-order signed first editions of this eagerly awaited 3rd instalment of the dazzling seasonal quartet click here

 

Ali Smith is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, Public library and other stories, Autumn, and Winter. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge, and hail’s from Inverness.