Autumn

Ali Smith

Feb 2017 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Melody Grove

About this audiobook

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about Autumn 2016? 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. Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. It is the first installment of her Seasonal quartet-four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are)-and it casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history making. Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, a story about aging and time and love and stories themselves.

About the author

Ali Smith was born in 1962 in Inverness. She is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Following this she became a full-time writer[4] and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature. Her short story colection includes: Free Love and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and The First Person and Other Stories. Her novels include: Like, Hotel World, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, There But For The, and How to Be Both. She was short listed for the Folio Prize 2015. She won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel How to be Both.