Showing results by author "Ali Smith" in All Categories

The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.

What happens when you run into Death in a busy train station? (You know he’s Death because when he smiles, your cell phone goes dead.) What if your lover falls in love with a tree? Should you be jealous? From the woman pursued by a band of bagpipers in full regalia to the artist who’s built a seven-foot boat out of secondhand copies of The Great Gatsby, Smith’s characters are offbeat, charming, sexy, and as wonderfully complex as life itself.

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 . . .

Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish Writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe.

Originally four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University, Artful is a tidal wave of ideas in four thematically organised bursts of thought: On Time, On Form, On Edge and On Offer and On Reflection. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. Full of both the poignancy and humour of fiction and all the sideways insights and jaunty angles you would expect from Ali Smith’s criticism

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?

'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party....' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear....

Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.

If you are looking to make positive changes in your life, you will find this book to be a great resource. ⚠ This book may cause miracles! ★ Foreward by Eamonn Smith, QTT Practitioner, Mindset and Manifestation Coach ★ Endorsed by Brad Yates, EFT Wizard, YouTuber, Author, Speaker, Happiness and Abundance Coach This powerful manifestation book will show you how to ✓ Be a vibrational match for what you desire to attract using the right frequencies. ✓ Think, feel and act as if your desires are already a reality. ✓ Take inspired action to attract your desires. ✓ Get into alignment ...

There's Amy, and there's Ash. There's ice, and there's fire. There's England, and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, Like soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths.

¿Qué une a Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, el Brexit, el presente, el pasado, un hombre de luto por los tiempos perdidos, una mujer atrapada en los tiempos modernos? La respuesta está en Primavera, una novela luminosa, generosa y llena de esperanza, en la que, al igual que en Otoño e Invierno, la autora escocesa está haciendo algo más que analizar las injusticias de nuestra época: nos ilumina el camino para salir de la pesadilla.

In these energetic, exhilarating stories, Ali Smith portrays a world of everyday dislocation, where people nevertheless find connection, mystery, and love. As Smith explores the subtle links between what we know and what we feel, she creates an exuberant, masterly collection that is packed full of ideas, humor, nuance, and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

The crow crossed the sky, slow-beating her wings. Beat, beat, beat. It was night, not yet morning, and her feathers were so black that she coasted the air invisible above the city wall. Thus begins Ali Smith's retelling of Sophocles' tragedy, about a young Theban princess who decides to bury her dishonoured brother Polynices, against King Creon's express orders, with heart-breaking consequences.

Why are books so powerful? What do the books we read make of us? And what does the vanishing of public libraries say about us? These stories are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us, how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once, how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.

Stories for people who've grown up being told time is running out - and don't want it to.... How do you ever know the whole story? How do you ever know even part of the story? How do you find meaning when chance and coincidence could, after all, just be chance and coincidence? In a celebration of connections and missed connections, an inquiry into everything from flies and trees and books to sex, art, drunkenness and love, Smith rewrites the year's cycle into a very modern calendar.

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 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.

En el presente, Sacha sabe que el mundo está en problemas. Su hermano Robert sólo es un problema. Su madre y su padre están teniendo problemas. Mientras tanto, el mundo está en crisis, y la verdadera debacle ni siquiera ha comenzado todavía. En el pasado, un verano encantador. Un Un hermano y una hermana diferentes saben que están viviendo en el tiempo prestado.

Este libro, en el que nos encontramos con algunos de sus mejores textos, contiene doce cuentos en los que el amor, la tristeza y, muy especialmente, los libros y los libreros son los protagonistas.

Dios había muerto: para empezar. Y el romanticismo había muerto. La gallardía había muerto. La poesía, la novela, la pintura, todas habían muerto, y el arte había muerto. El teatro y el cine habían muerto. La literatura había muerto. Muchísimas cosas habían muerto. Sin embargo, otras no habían muerto, de momento. La vida todavía no había muerto. La revolución no había muerto. La igualdad racial no había muerto. El odio no había muerto.