Ali Smith

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The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of How to be both

Companion piece

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Scottish Stories

Free Love

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

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Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021

Summer

The Accidental

'A dazzling hymn to hope’ Observer

Spring

'Dazzling, luminous, evergreen’ Daily Telegraph

Winter

SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017

Autumn

Public library and other stories

Hotel World

Love Quarrels from Anton Chekhov to ZZ Packer

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Artful

There but for the

The First Person and Other Stories

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The Member of the Wedding

Sunset Song

How to be Both

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Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance

I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul

Exciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers alive

A remarkably easy and immensely enjoyable read... Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation. Both George and Francesco touch the heart and linger in the mind long after the final page.

Smith is the brightest spark in a recent explosion of female novelists taking dizzying risks with form and voice . . . most contemporary male authors feel Jurassic by comparison.

Rich, funny and moving. Smith's writing really catches fire

This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times

Radical, dazzling . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith's re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains

Ms. Smith's writing is inventive and delighted. She cannot help being exuberant

Inventive, playful, compassionate. An immensely enjoyable read

I was utterly transported by Ali Smith's How to Be Both, a novel built from two stories that speak across six centuries. I'm about to read it for the fourth time

Smith is dazzling in her daring. Her inventive power pulls you through, gasping, to the final page

Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today

She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense

Smith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own . . . How to be both reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a trance

Utterly contemporary and vividly historical

Smith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challenging

One of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully

A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a jeu d'esprit about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist.

A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels

Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappoint

Brilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. 
 
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 
 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014 
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD 
 
'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard 
 
 How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. 
 
Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance. 
 
***** 
 
'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph 
 
'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton 
 
'A delight. A masterpiece. Magical' Sunday Times 
 
WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 
 
Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

How to be Both

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