Autumn

This is England Autumn is the first instalment of Ali Smith’s ‘seasonal quartet’ - a cycle ‘exploring the subjective experience of time, questioning the nature of time itself'. Triggered to read it by the title – autumn is my favourite season – this first episode was a wondrous introduction to Smith’......more

2020 update: this is still amazing. Hailed as the first post-Brexit novel, in Autumn Ali Smith proves to us all that she is probably the greatest writer currently working in the United Kingdom. The fact that this novel was published a mere four months after the disastrous Brexit vote but yet anal......more

I was struggling with this initially. Ali Smith's prose style reminds me of someone dressed in a dressing gown and slippers, hair unbrushed, wandering about a house with barely a grain of self-consciousness. In stark contrast to lots of writers who spend hours in front the mirror, layering on embell......more

to have been in a reading slump for more than a month, maybe longer, during which reading never even occurs to you and feels unnatural when it does, and then you start to feel it might be over and you finish a short book or two but then you pick one up that you actually can't stop reading, that you......more

Ok so.... I didn’t really get it 🤷‍♀️ I think I'm just going to have to stay away from the Booker Nominees. There always seems to be some hidden secret that everyone else knows, which gives the book 5 star reviews, while I sit here just....lost. Autumn is written in non-linear prose. Which is a good s......more