The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
The First Person and Other Stories

The First Person and Other Stories

Summary

A form-bending and endlessly inventive collection of short stories - from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet

'A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form' Independent


A middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. An innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, we see a narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and a nymph.

Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones in equal measure. One-of-a-kind Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

*****

'Hurrah for Ali Smith . . . A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is' The Times

'Gleefully turns the short story inside-out . . . Smith is such a dazzling author that finishing one of her books is always bittersweet' Scotland on Sunday

Reviews

  • Terrific . . . hurrah for Ali Smith
    The Times

About the author

Ali Smith

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more