Companion Piece

Published in 2022
228 pages

epub



Ali Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.

What is this book about?
A celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms…

It follows the unique achievement of her Seasonal cycle of novels – Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer – written and published in as close as possible to real time, between 2016 and 2020, absorbing and refracting the times we are living through: the ‘state-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us’ (New Statesman).

‘Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now’ Observer