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Autumn

(Seasonal #1)

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3.71 53,932 ratings 4,581 reviews
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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,... More
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... Less

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Average rating 3.71  ·  53,932 ratings  ·  4,581 reviews

rated it liked it
over 3 years ago

Shelves: british , booker
I don’t know. I don’t know what to write about Autumn. I don’t even know what I’ve read. What was I supposed to get from this book, what was the purpose? Was it a Brexit novel? I don’t think so. It does talk some about Brexit. But it also talks about a strange friendship bet ...more

rated it really liked it
7 months ago

Shelves: 2016 , uk , reviewed
This is England

Autumn is the first instalment of Ali Smith’s ‘seasonal quartet’ - a cycle ‘exploring the subjective experience of time, questioning the nature of time itself'. Triggered to read it by the title – autumn is my favourite season – this first episode was a wondro
...more

added it
7 months ago

What are you reading?

A tale of two people.

Tell me about it.

It's a book full of leaves, green ones and brown ones. And white ones too, of course.

Ha! But seriously, describe it to me.

It's a book with a hole in the middle.

Now you're just being absurd.

No, wait. There's really a
...more

rated it it was amazing
10 months ago

2020 update: this is still amazing.

Hailed as the first post-Brexit novel, in Autumn Ali Smith proves to us all that she is probably the greatest writer currently working in the United Kingdom. The fact that this novel was published a mere four months after the disastrous
...more

rated it really liked it
over 4 years ago

Ali Smith is not an easy author to read and yet her words and thoughts are beautiful. If you like a linear plot, you will not find it here, though it is mostly set in the period after Brexit, it goes back and forth in time. To a friendship between a young girl and an elderl ...more

rated it it was amazing
over 2 years ago

I was struggling with this initially. Ali Smith's prose style reminds me of someone dressed in a dressing gown and slippers, hair unbrushed, wandering about a house with barely a grain of self-consciousness. In stark contrast to lots of writers who spend hours in front the m ...more

rated it it was amazing
over 2 years ago

My fourth book from the Booker longlist, this is another that, like Reservoir 13, would have made a worthy winner. At the time of its release this book was billed as the first Brexit novel, but there is so much more to it than that.

update 19 Oct - Sadly, and yet again, Ali
...more

rated it liked it
over 1 year ago

Ok so.... I didn’t really get it 🤷‍♀️

I think I'm just going to have to stay away from the Booker Nominees. There always seems to be some hidden secret that everyone else knows, which gives the book 5 star reviews, while I sit here just....lost.

Autumn is written in non-linear
...more

rated it it was amazing
over 3 years ago

Shelves: 2017 , arc , netgalley
"April come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May she will stay
Resting in my arms again
June she'll change her tune
In restless walks she'll prowl the night"

--“April Come She Will” lyrics by Paul Simon

"It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times."

Tra
...more

Other Books by this Author

  • How to Be Both
    How to Be Both
    by Ali Smith
  • Winter (Seasonal #2)
    Winter
    by Ali Smith
  • The Accidental
    The Accidental
    by Ali Smith
  • Spring (Seasonal, #3)
    Spring
    by Ali Smith
  • There but for the
    There but for the
    by Ali Smith
  • Girl Meets Boy
    Girl Meets Boy
    by Ali Smith
  • Hotel World
    Hotel World
    by Ali Smith
  • Summer (Seasonal, #4)
    Summer
    by Ali Smith
  • Public Library and Other Stories
    Public Library and Other Stories
    by Ali Smith

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Book details

Hardcover, 264 pages
Published October 20th 2016 by Hamish Hamilton
ISBN
0241207002 (ISBN13: 9780241207000)
Edition language
English
Original title
Autumn
Literary Awards
Booker Prize, Gordon Burn Prize

About this author

3,335 followers
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 for ...more

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Quotes

She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.
I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.
Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

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