Book Summary and Reviews of Spring by Ali Smith

Spring by Ali Smith

Spring

A Seasonal Quartet Novel

by Ali Smith

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  • Published:
  • Apr 2019, 304 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the Man Booker-short-listed author of Autumn and Winter comes the highly anticipated third novel in the acclaimed 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 tell 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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Smith's work is always challenging and always rewarding." - Kirkus Reviews

"The third book in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices .... This is writing that acts by accretion, subliminally, weaving you into its webs of stories. Now that we are past the halfway mark it's possible to perceive the shape of the whole, to recognise quite how dazzling the interplay of ideas and images between the four books will be." - The Guardian, Alex Preston

"Spring is an astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons." - The Independent

This information about Spring was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Ali Smith Author Biography

Photo: © Christian Sinibaldi

Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Companion Piece, the "Seasonal Quartet," Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.

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