Spring

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020

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.

“Bracing … [Spring] taps deeply into our contemporary unease. It’s always alive … Smith embeds her politics in interlocking plotlines that flow like waking dreams, in melodies and countermelodies … You never doubt you’re in the presence of a serious artist … ”—New York Times