2020 update: this is still amazing.Hailed as the first post-Brexit novel, in Autumn Ali Smith proves to us all that she is probably the greatest writer currently working in the United Kingdom. The fact that this novel was published a mere four months after the disastrous Brexit vote but yet analyses its aftermath as a central theme shows a turnaround that is nearly insane. Smith must have practically vomited this novel into her word processor, which makes its utter flawlessness almost divine...

Ali Smith is not an easy author to read and yet her words and thoughts are beautiful. If you like a linear plot, you will not find it here, though it is mostly set in the period after Brexit, it goes back and forth in time. To a friendship between a young girl and an elderly man, a man who had quite a past, which is slowly uncovered. The thoughts expressed about Brexit are the same many are expressing here in the states after our recent election. Wonderfully and adroitly expressed about the way

I was struggling with this initially. Ali Smith's prose style reminds me of someone dressed in a dressing gown and slippers, hair unbrushed, wandering about a house with barely a grain of self-consciousness. In stark contrast to lots of writers who spend hours in front the mirror, layering on embellishment after embellishment, before they take a step onto the page. Smith can give the impression of voicing aloud her thoughts the moment she has them. No artificial colouring or sweetening additives...

Ok so.... I didn’t really get it 🤷‍♀️I think I'm just going to have to stay away from the Booker Nominees. There always seems to be some hidden secret that everyone else knows, which gives the book 5 star reviews, while I sit here just....lost.Autumn is written in non-linear prose. Which is a good starting point as to why I didn't like it - I can't get with that type of writing. I like my stories in some kind of order, at the very least. In Autumn we jump from Elisabeth as a child, hanging out w...

"April come she willWhen streams are ripe and swelled with rainMay she will stayResting in my arms againJune she'll change her tuneIn restless walks she'll prowl the night" --“April Come She Will” lyrics by Paul Simon"It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times."Traveling back and forth through time, the past to the present, from Elisabeth’s childhood and meeting her new neighbor Daniel Gluck, to the brink of the political climate that began with Brexit, this story covers a lot of terri...

My thoughts are all over the place for this book – maybe fitting because this is what this book is as well: all over the place. There is undeniable brilliance here: sentences so profound they made me stop in my tracks, word plays so wonderful I had to read them twice, musing on a great number of important things. It comes as no surprise that Ali Smith is a genius. But for some reasons these sparks of brilliance never came together for a coherent whole for me – and I guess this was also the point...

I'm not sure I can do justice to reviewing this or explaining what it is about - I suspect each time it's read, a new layer is revealed and it becomes something quite different. Let me just say the writing and wordplay is superb! Imaginative, perceptive, unexpectedly quite funny in places, and tender in others. I'd say the resounding theme in this book is loss - summer gives way to autumn in the seasons and in our lives, but there is beauty to be found in the journey.Don't go in to this expectin...

I enjoyed Autumn immensely because of its wit, intelligence and creative charm. The novel is inventive, playful and clever. It is a book that weaves together ideas and references from a huge number of places, channelling them into a relevant and potent story. The descriptions are masterful in tone and have flourishes of vivid colour, comparable only to the writing of Virginia Woolf. There is also a lot of history that hangs over the book, as a lot of history hangs over the autumn season. There a...

This is not only the first of four novels based on the seasons, but it has also been acclaimed as the first Brexit novel. This makes it very British in some ways and the feelings in the country and the reactions to the vote form part of the novel, as in this much quoted piece:“All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing. All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air abov...

I was going to save this to read in the autumn, but then it was included in the Man Booker Prize Long List so I moved it up.This is described as a post-Brexit novel, and it does take place in that world and mentions it a few times in a few different ways, but more in the way that all of us continue in the world as it changes around us. "...I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the...

Autumn *****Winter *****Spring ****Summer *****I have no idea what just happened to me. I thought I would hate this book. I thought I should read it, because it was nominated for that thing, but, yeah I was sure I'd hate it. And I did. That first chapter? Very strange. I'm going to hate it, I thought. But then I turned the page, and then I turned another, and another, and then, oh! I laughed out loud. That first LOL? Very strange. I read a few pages more, and my hand reached out to my chest. By

I am afraid much of this abstract work went way over my head. The subversive criticism of post-truth politics in a new era of mass media, the half-comic, half-indignant sketches of our senseless bureaucratic system, the sadly recurrent reality of female artists neglected again and again in a world ruled by men. Smith’s creates a collage with such weighty subjects and uses it to paint the backdrop of Elisabeth and Daniel’s story while traveling back and forth in time.The perception of time is pre...

It is November and outside my front door roses are still blooming. Their color is a deep rich clear pink. They look better than they did in the dry heat of summer.Smith’s first novel in her proposed quartet of volumes is an utter delight. I’d never encountered her voice before but when I got to the end, I looked again at the beginning. Just as well, because I had forgotten that Daniel speaks, briefly, before the story gets picked up by “his granddaughter,” Elisabeth, with an “s.”What I find quee...

Autumn was my first Ali Smith novel and I liked it rather than loved it.The book concerns the long term relationship between its two central characters, Elisabeth Demand and her elderly neighbour Daniel.It’s refracted storyline is told through a series of seemingly random scenes, conversations, dreams and imagined incidents. We jump about in time and the effect is often surreal.I’m still trying to work out how much I actually enjoyed the novel ........At first the language felt awkward and jagge...

Heaps of spine-tingling narrative pleasure. One feels the hairs on one’s nape standing on end while reading. Autumn’s a book about enlightened values versus what we’ve been getting lately from the mobocracy. No need to mention the B word or the T word here. Most things I read, the author’s point of view does not reflect my values, though he or she may come close. Quite the opposite with Autumn. Reading Smith one feels one has met with a very like-minded person. In my broad reading experience, th...