Autumn – the first in a planned four-part series: Winter, Spring and Summer to follow – is anchored in the specifics of our post-Brexit present day, the world we’re living in in real time played out in parallel in Smith’s text – “Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening.” Smith has played with time in previous work – think of her Bailey’s Prize-winning novel How to be both, which intertwined two separate stories, one set in 15th century Italy, the other in contemporary Britain, in the most interesting of ways – and again, here in Autumn time is something the warp and weft of which can be bent on a whim: past, present and strange timeless limbos exist alongside each other. 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.
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