Autumn (Smith) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. [Autumn is] unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time.
New York Times


Beautiful, subtle.… Brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope.
New York Times Book Review


Delights in puns and lyric reveries. For a book about decline and disintegration, Autumn remains irrepressibly hopeful about life, something "you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you."
Wall Street Journal


Shimmers with wit, melancholy, grief, joy, wisdom, small acts of love and, always, wonder at the seasons.
Boston Globe


Smith regales us with endless wordplay.… Autumn is the first installment of Smith’s ‘Seasonal’ quartet. If this brilliantly inventive and ruminative book is representative of what is to come, then we should welcome Smith’s winter chill whatever the season.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


It is undoubtedly Smith at her best.… This book sets Smith’s complex creative character in stone: puckish yet elegant, angry but comforting. Long may she remain that way.
Times (UK)


Already acknowledged as one of the most inventive novelists writing in Britain today, with her new novel, Autumn, Ali Smith also proves herself to be one of the country’s foremost chroniclers, her finger firmly on the social and political pulse.
Independent (UK)


An ambitious, multi-layered creation.… Smith is convincing as both a 12-year-old girl proud of her new rollerblades and a man living in a care home.… The story is rooted in autumn, and Smith writes lyrically about the changing seasons.… An energising and uplifting story.
Evening Standard (UK)


Proving Smith’s ambition and scope, Autumn is the first in a four-part series (the other titles will be Spring, Winter and Summer).… If the first instalment is anything to go by, the series is destined to become a canon classic.… That Smith has done so with such impressive sleight of hand, and with such expediency, is incredible.
Irish Independent


Smith writes in a liltingly singsong prose that fizzes with exuberant punning and wordplay.… Compellingly contemporary.… [An] appeal to conscience and common humanity—intergenerational, interracial, international — in these deeply worrying times.
Irish Times


Knits together an astonishing array of seemingly disparate subjects.… Free spirits and the lifeforce of art — along with kindness, hope, and a readiness "to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it" — are, when you get down to it, what Smith champions in this stirring novel.
NPR


Smith’s novel plays an intimate melody against a broader dissonance, probing the friendship between an art historian and an aging songwriter as they grapple with personal predicaments and a perilous world.
Oprah Magazine


In Britain, Smith has won the Whitbread, the Goldsmiths, and the Costa prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker three times. American readers ought to be better acquainted with her genius.… This ambitious four-novel sequence will end with summer and Smith in her element. If we are all very lucky, perhaps the world will catch up with her there, too.
Slate


[A] splendid free-form novel — the first in a seasonally themed tetralogy.… Eschewing traditional structure and punctuation, the novel charts a wild course through uncertain terrain, an approach that excites and surprises in equal turn.… Smith, always one to take risks, sees all of them pay off yet again.
Publishers Weekly


At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith’s new novel is the charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small pleasures is enthusiastically recommended.
Library Journal


A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.… Smith has a gift for drawing a reader into whatever world she creates.… [Autumn is] compelling in its emotional and historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and loss.
Kirkus Reviews