Seasonal Quartet
4 primary works
Book 1
A Washington Post Notable Book and One of the 10 Best Books of the Year from The New York Times
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.
Book 2
Discover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right now
All four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer
A Book of the Year according to: the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Evening Standard, The Times.
'Dazzling' Daily Telegraph
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter.
The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire.
In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.
It's the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter.
Book 3
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER
Discover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right now
All four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer
'Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices' Observer
'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent
'State-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us' New Statesman
'Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to' The Times
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.
LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2019
Praise for the Seasonal Quartet:
'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 on Autumn
'The novel of the year is obviously Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain' Olivia Laing, Observer on Autumn
'Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days... 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
'Rank[s] among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present' Financial Times on Winter
'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
Book 4
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?
Summer.