Search results for ""Author Ali Smith""
Penguin Books Ltd Winter: 'Dazzling, luminous, evergreen’ Daily Telegraph
A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now.*****'Dazzling . . . Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen' Daily Telegraph 'Graceful, mischievous, joyful . . . Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope' Independent 'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit . . . Luminously beautiful' Observer
£9.99
Comma Press Morphologies: Short Story Writers on Short Story Writers
What makes for a good short story? Being short, you might think the storys structure would yield an answer to this question more readily than, say, the novel. But for as long as the short story has been around, arguments have raged as to what it should and shouldnt be made up of, what it should and shouldnt do. Here,15 leading contemporary practitioners offer structural appreciations of past masters of the form as well as their own perspectives on what the short story does so well. The best short stories dont have closure, argues one contributor, because life doesnt have closure; plot must be written with the denouement constantly in view, quotes another. Covering a century of writing that arguably saw all the major short forms emerge, from Hawthornes Twice Told Tales to Kafkas modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.
£11.24
Little, Brown Book Group Free Love And Other Stories
A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.
£9.99
Little, Brown Book Group Like
There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 'Ingenious, shimmering fiction, written with a poetic grace that subtly illuminates the tensions between hope and desire, between past and present' Scotland on Sunday
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd How to be Both
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014WINNER 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 TimesWINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.
£9.99
Little, Brown A Cage Went in Search of a Bird
A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European*Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writ
£14.99
Penguin Books Ltd Autumn: SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017
SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting' The Times Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.*****ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting' The Times'Bold and brilliant' Observer'Terrific, extraordinary, playful . . . There is an awful lot to lift the soul' Daily Mail
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Hotel World
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION A masterful, exuberant novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and ambitious book, the brilliant Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . .*****'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open from the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times 'Hotel World is essential reading from a major talent' Independent
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Whole Story and Other Stories
A wildly inventive collection of fiction from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED and BAILEYS PRIZE-WINNING author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Summer: Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' GuardianIn the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer. Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now.*****'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force' Evening Standard'Exquisite. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times
£16.99
Little, Brown Book Group A Cage Went in Search of a Bird
A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European*Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writ
£18.99
Penguin Books Ltd Public library and other stories
A richly inventive collection of stories about our enduring love of books from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Smith is dazzling in her daring. Sheer inventive power' ObserverWhy are books so powerful? What do the books we read make of us? And what does the vanishing of public libraries say about us? These stories are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make. Public libraries are places of joy, freedom, community and discovery - and they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith raises her voice in defence of our public libraries, celebrating their essential place in our culture and history.*****'Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation' Daily Express'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' Scotsman'Smith's world is incredibly generous - it's a place where all sorts of stories and human connections are possible' Metro
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd There but for the
A sparkling satire from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting' Guardian 'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party . . .' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear...*****'Adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read' Literary Review 'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Accidental
WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL OF THE YEARSHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE AWARD 'Joyous' The Times The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.*****'Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious. . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh' Sunday Telegraph 'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer'A beguiling page-turner . . . To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last' Independent
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Companion piece
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartetOne day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she''s been left with after she''s spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom: ''Curlew or curfew? You choose.''And what''s any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago?Ali Smith''s novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.''[An] entertaining and expert portrayal of the wor
£16.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Accidental
'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema . . .'One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely?'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer
£9.28
Penguin Books Ltd Spring: 'A dazzling hymn to hope’ Observer
SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'Her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices' Observer What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, 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.Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.*****'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent'Smith is a masterful storyteller . . . Savour it' Evening Standard'Infectious in its energy and warmth' Daily Telegraph
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Winter: 'Dazzling, luminous, evergreen’ Daily Telegraph
Discover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right nowAll four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer A Book of the Year according to: the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Evening Standard, The Times.'Dazzling' Daily TelegraphWinter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.
£16.99
Penguin Books Ltd Spring: 'A dazzling hymn to hope’ Observer
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLERDiscover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right nowAll four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer 'Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices' Observer'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent'State-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us' New Statesman'Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to' The TimesWhat unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, 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.LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2019Praise for the Seasonal Quartet:'Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, and all the dimensions of love. It's a case not so much of reading between the lines as of being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way' Deborah Levy on Autumn'The novel of the year is obviously Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain' Olivia Laing, Observer on Autumn'Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days... Combining brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art' NPR on Winter'Rank[s] among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present' Financial Times on Winter'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised... Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain... Luminously beautiful' Observer on Winter
£16.99
Penguin Books Ltd The First Person and Other Stories
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
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Summer: Winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' GuardianIn the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer. Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.*****'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force' Evening Standard'Exquisite. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Companion piece: The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of How to be both
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartetOne day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she's been left with after she's spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom:'Curlew or curfew? You choose.'And what's any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago?Ali Smith's novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.'[An] entertaining and expert portrayal of the world we live in, seen by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences' Telegraph'[Companion piece] makes you look at the world afresh. For me, it turned a cold and depressing day into a bright one' New StatesmanLONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022
£9.99
Everyman Reunion
The romantic forested landscape of southwest Germany is the setting for the birth of a friendship that will haunt sixteen-year-old Hans Schwarz for the rest of his life. Hans is Jewish, the son of a doctor who is confident that the rise of the Nazis is only 'a temporary illness' afflicting his beloved country. Hans's new classmate, Konradin von Hohenfels, is a dazzling young aristocrat whose mother keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dressing-table. Hans is immediately drawn to Konradin, and thrilled when a close bond forms between them, forged by common interests that set them apart from the other boys. But their loyalties are soon tested in ways they could not have imagined. Three decades later, from the vantage point of New York City, Hans once again confronts this life-shaping episode from his youth, through a stunning revelation that he stumbles upon by chance. In its story of friendship undone by History, Reunion combines the explosive compression of a fable with the emotional depth of an epic novel many times its length.
£12.99
Penguin Young Readers Reunion: Introduction by Ali Smith
£17.66
Little, Brown Book Group A Far Cry From Kensington
'Mercurially funny, playful and mischievous' Ali Smith'I was in heaven reading this book. I think she writes like an angel . . . just blissful' Stephen FryA novel of 'pure delight' (Claire Tomalin) by the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.When Mrs Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he 'urinates frightful prose', little does she realise the repercussions. Holding that 'no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest' Mrs Hawkins refuses to retract her judgement, and as a consequence, loses not one, but two much-sought-after jobs in publishing. Now, years older, successful, and happily a far cry from Kensington, she looks back over the dark days that followed, in which she was embroiled in a mystery involving anonymous letters, quack remedies, blackmail and suicide.With an introduction by Ali Smith.'Wonderfully entertaining.' Sunday Telegraph'An outstanding novel ... A Far Cry From Kensington has an effortless, translucent grasp of the spirit of the period.' Observer
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHKatherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from short sharp studies to longer, richer tales, encompassing her three major volumes Bliss, The Garden Party and In a German Pension, and fifteen tantalizing fragments of unfinished stories published after her tragic death, including 'Honesty', an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and 'The Doves' Nest', an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter in the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Graceful, delicate and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters' inner lives.
£14.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Hearing Trumpet
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHA classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounding the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a British born Surrealist painter and writer described, alongside people such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. Born in Lancashire to a strict Catholic family, she first came into contact with surrealism through her lover, Surrealist painter Max Ernst, before moving to Mexico in 1942. The Hearing Trumpet, her most famous piece of writing, was first published in France in 1974.If you enjoyed The Hearing Trumpet, you might like Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days' Luis Buñuel'One of the most original, joyful, satisfying and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century'Ali Smith'This book is so inspiring...I love its freedom, its humour and how it invents its own laws. What specifically do I take from her? Her wig'Björk
£9.99
Vintage Publishing Chroma: A Book of Colour - June '93
A poetic, passionate and intensely personal exploration of colour written during the final year of Derek Jarman's life -- with a new introduction by Ali Smith.In Chroma, his most poetic and lyrical book, Derek Jarman explores the uses of colour. Shifting across the spectrum and from the medieval to the modern, he draws on the work of great colour theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. Interwoven with these musings are evocative memories from Jarman's childhood and illustrious career, along with reflections on his deteriorating health. Written a year before Jarman’s death, and as his eyesight was failing, this is an intensely personal work; a paean from an artist seeking to memorialise the extraordinary power of colour even while it receded from his own life.
£9.67
Little, Brown Book Group A Far Cry From Kensington
With a cover design by Lucienne DayWhen Mrs Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he is a 'pisseur de copie', that he 'urinates frightful prose', little does she realise the repercussions. Holding that 'no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest' Mrs Hawkins refuses to retract her judgement, and as a consequence, loses not one, but two much-sought-after jobs in publishing. Now, years older, successful, and happily a far cry from Kensington, she looks back over the dark days that followed, in which she was embroiled in a mystery involving anonymous letters, quack remedies, blackmail and suicide.
£14.99
Thames & Hudson Ltd Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life
Barbara Hepworth is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, yet she has been the subject of relatively few monographs in comparison to her male counterparts. This biography moves beyond the traditional narratives of modernism, truth to materials, and the landscape to provide a penetrating insight into Hepworth’s remarkable life, work and legacy. Barbara Hepworth was reproached for single-mindedness in her lifetime, with critics and commentators framing both the artist and her work as ‘cool and restrained’. A continued focus on her modernist abstract sculpture of the 1930s and its relation to her male contemporaries has left vast swathes of her work and related passions overlooked. This fully illustrated biography reflects for the first time Hepworth’s multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and networked approach, shedding light as never before on her interests in music, dance, poetry, contemporary politics, science and technology; her engagement with these fields through friends and networks as well as her artistic practice; and the ways in which she synthesized sometimes seemingly conflicting disciplines and ideas into one coherent and inspirational philosophy of art and life.With 178 illustrations
£22.50
Penguin Books Ltd The Member of the Wedding
'Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed' The New York TimesWith delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away.
£9.99
Little, Brown Book Group The Comforters
'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times.' Ian RankinIn this first novel by Muriel Spark - author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - the only things that aren't ambiguous are Spark's matchless originality and glittering wit.With an introduction by Ali Smith.Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. She has an unusual problem - she realises she is in a novel. Her fellow characters are also possibly deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread - could his elderly grandmother really be a smuggler? And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England's leading Satanist.'A master of malice and mayhem.' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times'Brilliantly original and fascinating.' Evelyn Waugh'A light, clever, mirthful tour de force ... It disrupts and charms its readers with its combination of wit, precision, intelligence and hilarity. As vibrant as ever, more than fifty years after its first appearance.' Ali Smith
£9.99
Vintage Publishing Wise Children
This title is presented with an introduction by Ali Smith. A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances, Angela Carter's witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins, and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.
£9.99
HarperCollins Publishers Super-Cannes
A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean is the setting for a most disturbing crime in this reissue featuring a new introduction by Ali Smith. A disturbing mystery awaits Paul and Jane Sinclair when they arrive in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes. Jane is to work as a doctor for those who live in this ultra-modern workers’ paradise. But what caused her predecessor to go on a shooting spree that made headlines around the world? As Paul investigates, he begins to uncover a thriving subculture of crime that is spiralling out of control. Both novel of ideas and complex thriller, ‘Super-Cannes’ is an extraordinary satire from the author of ‘Empire of the Sun’, ‘The Drowned World’ and ‘Crash’. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Hari Kunzru, James Lever and Zadie Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.
£10.99
Penguin Books Ltd Sunset Song
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHYoung Chris Guthrie lives a brutal life in the harsh landscape of northern Scotland, torn between her passion for the land, duty to her family and her love of books. When her mother, broken by repeated childbirths, takes her own life and poisons her two youngest children, Chris is left with her father to run the farm on her own. Soon she is alone, and for the first time can choose how to spend her life. But as the First World War begins, everything changes, and the young men leave Scotland for battle. The first in Gibbon's classic trilogy A Scot's Quair, Sunset Song is infused with local vernacular, and innovatively blends Scots and English in an intense description of Scottish life in the early twentieth century.
£9.99
Birlinn General Greenvoe
Greenvoe, the tight-knit community on the Orcadian island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations, but Operation Black Star requires the island for unspecified purposes and threatens the islanders’ way of life. A whole host of characters - The Skarf, failed fishermen and Marxist historian; Ivan Westray, boatman and dallier; pious creeler Samuel Whaness; drunken fishermen Bert Kerston; earth-mother Alice Voar, and meths-drinker Timmy Folster - are vividly brought to life in this sparkling mixture of prose and poetry. In the end Operation Black Star fails, but not before it has ruined the island; but the book ends on a note of hope as the islanders return to celebrate the ritual rebirth of Hellya.
£10.45
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems, Stories and Writings
Margaret Tait (1918–1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. 'In a documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, draws on Tait’s three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.
£14.99
Penguin Putnam Inc Let Your Light Shine: How Mindfulness Can Empower Children and Rebuild Communities
£26.00
Quercus Publishing Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City
London today is embattled as rarely before. In a city of enormous wealth, poverty is rampant. The burnt-out hulk of Grenfell Tower stands as an appalling reminder that inequality can be so acute as to be murderous. Here, Claire Armitstead has drawn together fiction, reportage and poetry to capture the schisms defining the contemporary city. With nearly 40% of the capital's population born outside the country, Tales of Two Londons eschews what Armitstead labels a "tyranny of tone," emphasising voices rarely heard. Featuring writers such as Ali Smith, Jon Snow, Arifa Akbar and Ruth Padel alongside stories from previously unpublished immigrants and refugees, this is a compelling collection which captures the fabric of the city: its housing, its food, its pubs, its buses, even its graveyards.
£9.99
Comma Press Refugee Tales
Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across... A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers 'acting on a tip-off' and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape... An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery - first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking - writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention... These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe's new underclass - its refugees. While those with "citizenship" enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain's policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims' stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.
£11.24
Fitzcarraldo Editions A Very Easy Death
Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother’s refusal to ‘go gentle’ while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir ‘shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence’ (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.
£10.99
Royal Academy of Arts Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life
In 2018 the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts will host major exhibitions of the work of Tacita Dean. Each will provide a different encounter with her art. This book brings together new and existing works from all three exhibitions - LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE - with texts offering a unique insight into Dean's work by leading writers including Alexandra Harris, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith. Published at a particularly prolific period for Dean, this book provides a new and authoritative view of a hugely influential artist who has been at the forefront of British art for over twenty years. The volume is published with three different covers.
£22.46
Pan Macmillan Trumpet
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love. It is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.With an introduction by author Ali Smith.When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village.'Kay carefully registers the technical difficulties of transgendered life . . . She leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love' – New York Times
£9.99