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Unmissable third instalment in the bestselling, critically adored, dazzling inventive novel cycle, the Seasonal Quartet.
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, 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.
Author: Ali Smith
Paperback Published 17 March 2020 352 pages
“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 . . . Smith’s vision isn’t fundamentally pessimistic . . . There’s too much squirming life in her fiction, slashes of cleansing light for those who seek it.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Among my favorite contemporary authors, Ali Smith leads the parade. I love the brassy blast of her outrage at the world's injustices and the drumbeat of her passion for the arts. . . . I love her clever wordplay, her insistence on the life-enhancing possibilities of love and decency, and her ability to compose artful literature that sings of both humanity's heart and heartbreaks. All of these qualities are on abundant display in Spring, the third volume of Smith's seasonal quartet. While it's hard to top There but for the (2011) and How to be both (2014), it looks like Smith may end up doing that with this remarkable project. . . . Each volume revolves around different characters, so it's fine to read them individually, or in no set order. But you'd risk missing the swell of Smith's moral fury and the deliciously subtle through-lines and connections she plants in each book. . . . Spring uncoils strikingly, like a vernal fern. . . . Smith reminds us: ‘Hot air rises and can not just carry us but help us rise above.’ So can her novels.”—Heller McAlpin, NPR
“[Smith is] the most audacious political novelist in the language . . . Our refugee crisis, sex trafficking, the West's pathetic responses: All weigh heavily on her. But as in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West there's a whiff of magic, the flicker of redemption. Spring skips playfully across time and perspectives . . . The prose here is vintage Smith: slangy and acerbic but speckled like a quail's egg with lyrical insights. What Richard observes about Mansfield's writing could also apply to this author: ‘She is funny . . . brilliant, tricksy, arch, flirty, charming, and full of an unfathomable energy . . .’ With its inventive twists, all-too-human cast and wrenching political reckoning, Spring ushers in a fresh season of Ali Smith's genius. Summer beckons, just ahead.”—Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune