Echoing Keats’s famous ode, the book is punctuated by placid country scenes of grain being harvested, birds flying south, days growing shorter and nights longer and colder. So familiar is this picture of autumnal transformation that readers are easily lulled into a false sense of comfort. But it slowly becomes clear that the novel’s true subject is something far more unsettling: the ways these seasonal rhythms are being irreversibly altered by human activity.
The last in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet novels [Summer] rush-published to encompass current events, explores Covid anxiety and climate despair through one Brighton family.
Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art (via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery), Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
-Goodreads
Original post was in 2017. I’m updating this in anticipation of Ali Smith’s 4th book in the Seasonal series, Summer, which has an expected publication date of August 6, 2020.
I. Autumn
Goodreads Reviews
3.7 rating based on 79,017 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0241207002
ISBN-13: 9780241207000
Goodreads: 28446947
Author(s): Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Published: 10/20/2016
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. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian 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 timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.
Here comes Autumn.
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.
II. Winter
Goodreads Reviews
3.8 rating based on 23,464 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0241207029
ISBN-13: 9780241207024
Goodreads: 34516974
Author(s): Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Published: 11/2/2017
The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith’s essential Seasonal Quartet—from the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be Both.
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'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.
III. Spring
Goodreads Reviews
4.1 rating based on 16,028 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0241207053
ISBN-13: 9780241207055
Goodreads: 40545817
Author(s): Publisher:
Published: //
Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the earth, things are growing.
IV. Summer
Goodreads Reviews
4.0 rating based on 11,574 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0241207061
ISBN-13: 9780241207062
Goodreads: 52842705
Author(s): Publisher:
Published: 8/2/2020
In 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.
