The opening pages of Autumn are as untethered as the beginning of the fifteenth-century section of How to Be Both. Thus Autumn, published in October of that year, became the first ‘post-Brexit novel’. While she was completing Autumn, in June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU, and Smith pleaded with her publisher for a month’s extension on her deadline, to allow her to adapt and update the book.

She decided to write four slim novels, one a year, which taken together would form some kind of whole, despite the fact that all four would be very different. That book ended up being produced, printed and bound in about six weeks, to meet its publishing deadline, and the quick turnaround time made Smith realise that she could write a novel of the contemporary moment and have it reach bookshops with remarkable rapidity.

The idea crystallised when she was late in completing How to Be Both. Your experience of reading How to Be Both, therefore, was vastly different depending on which copy you happened to take off the shelf.Īutumn and Winter are the first two novels of a proposed seasonal quartet Smith has been planning for over twenty years. While the modern story is a fairly straightforward narrative, about a teenage girl in Cambridge who has lost her mother, the Italian section is in the voice of a recently-deceased 500-year-old cross-dressing fresco painter, and begins at a level of surreality and with a lack of context that is disorientating for a good few pages.

Most readers-and many reviewers-were oblivious to the fact that were two editions. The novel comprises two discrete stories, one set in the present day and one in fifteenth-century Italy, and half of the books were printed with the modern story first, while the other half began in the Renaissance. In her award-winning 2014 novel How to Be Both, Smith managed to extend her playfulness to the production of the book itself-a process not well known for its adventurousness. Her most recent books, Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017), reflect the United Kingdom’s bleak political climate, but manage to be light-hearted and high-spirited at the same time. Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a lesson in how to create novels that reflect the now in all its glory and horror, writes The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec.Īli Smith is one of the most interesting, inventive and enjoyable experimental literary novelists currently writing in what might be called the mainstream.

Autumn by ali smith reviews