Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

O brave new world, that has such people in't.

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.

What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.

What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

In four short stories, fusions of fiction, biography, autobiography and poetry, Ali Smith pays tribute to the sources, the people and the places which produce and nurture life and art.

Greenvoe, the tight-knit community on the Orcadian island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations, but Operation Black Star requires the island for unspecified purposes and threatens the islanders' way of life. A whole host of characters - The Skarf, failed fishermen and Marxist historian; Ivan Westray, boatman and dallier; pious creeler Samuel Whaness; drunken fishermen Bert Kerston; earth-mother Alice Voar, and meths-drinker Timmy Folster - are vividly brought to life in this sparkling mixture of prose and poetry. In the end Operation Black Star fails, but not before it has ruined the island; but the book ends on a note of hope as the islanders return to celebrate the ritual rebirth of Hellya.

The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world.

We live with the idea of sin every day - from the greatest transgressions to the tiniest misdemeanours. But surely the concept was invented for an age where divine retribution and eternal punishment dominated the collective consciousness? In this lively collection of new writing, Nicola Barker, Dylan Evans, David Flusfeder, Todd McEwen, Martin Rowson, John Sutherland and Ali Smith go head to head with the capital vices to explore what we really mean when we talk about sin. The resulting mixture of erudite and playful essays and startling new fiction might not make you a better person, but it will certainly give you pause for thought when you're next laying the law down or - heaven forfend - about to do something beyond the pale yourself.

A sparkling satire from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting' Guardian '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... ***** 'Adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read' Literary Review 'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph

A thought-provoking volume on Edvard Munch’s often neglected pictures of nature, exploring the Norwegian artist’s landscapes, seascapes, and existential environments in light of his own time and ours This richly illustrated catalogue provides a multifaceted perspective on the pictures of nature and landscape by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This important topic has been neglected in scholarship on Munch, despite the fact that it is a major motif in his oeuvre. This volume is the first to explore the theme in its full breadth throughout Munch’s corpus, including his paintings, lithographs, watercolors, and woodcuts. His depictions of forests, farmland, and the seashore, as well as paintings of sea storms, snow, and other extreme weather, present us with undulating forms that animate nature. They likewise provide an example of Munch’s preference for liminal spaces where transformations take place, often celebrating human interaction with nature in its many manifestations. The book also considers Munch’s less conventional landscapes, and particularly those where his famous Scream motif occurs. These environments depict nature in an existential way, suggesting that the artist held a deep concern for nature’s destruction by humans—a concern no less relevant today. A complementary look at his writings as primary sources alongside his images shows how Munch mixed a scientific perspective on nature with metaphysical and spiritual notions of rebirth that permeate other parts of his corpus. The book also includes a engaging short story by award-winning author Ali Smith that was inspired by Munch's work. Distributed for MUNCH  Exhibition Schedule: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (June 10–October 15, 2023) Museum Barberini, Potsdam (November 18, 2023–April 1, 2024) Munch Museum, Oslo (April 27–August 24, 2024)

SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'Her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices' Observer What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal. Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. ***** 'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent 'Smith is a masterful storyteller . . . Savour it' Evening Standard 'Infectious in its energy and warmth' Daily Telegraph

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' Guardian 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. Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now. ***** 'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force' Evening Standard 'Exquisite. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola Sturgeon 'An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times

With a cover design by Lucienne Day When Mrs Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he is a 'pisseur de copie', that he 'urinates frightful prose', little does she realise the repercussions. Holding that 'no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest' Mrs Hawkins refuses to retract her judgement, and as a consequence, loses not one, but two much-sought-after jobs in publishing. Now, years older, successful, and happily a far cry from Kensington, she looks back over the dark days that followed, in which she was embroiled in a mystery involving anonymous letters, quack remedies, blackmail and suicide.

Barbara Hepworth is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, yet she has been the subject of relatively few monographs in comparison to her male counterparts. This biography moves beyond the traditional narratives of modernism, truth to materials, and the landscape to provide a penetrating insight into Hepworth’s remarkable life, work and legacy. Barbara Hepworth was reproached for single-mindedness in her lifetime, with critics and commentators framing both the artist and her work as ‘cool and restrained’. A continued focus on her modernist abstract sculpture of the 1930s and its relation to her male contemporaries has left vast swathes of her work and related passions overlooked. This fully illustrated biography reflects for the first time Hepworth’s multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and networked approach, shedding light as never before on her interests in music, dance, poetry, contemporary politics, science and technology; her engagement with these fields through friends and networks as well as her artistic practice; and the ways in which she synthesized sometimes seemingly conflicting disciplines and ideas into one coherent and inspirational philosophy of art and life. With 178 illustrations

A collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one hundred years since his death Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation, adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes - and very few artists in any field have created work that captures so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence. What happens when Kafka's 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 anxiety attacks, these specially commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

A New York Review Books Original

Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation

"Fair Play" is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.
Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they've never really stopped taking each other by surprise. "Fair Play "shows us Mari and Jona's intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other's work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson's "The Summer Book"), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.

A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers:

Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O'Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeymi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Smith - introduced by Sandi Toksvig.

DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO.

For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words that have defined and decried us. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood; words that tell a story.

In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time.

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's remix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world. The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

In 2018 the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts will host major exhibitions of the work of Tacita Dean. Each will provide a different encounter with her art. This book brings together new and existing works from all three exhibitions - LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE - with texts offering a unique insight into Dean's work by leading writers including Alexandra Harris, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith. Published at a particularly prolific period for Dean, this book provides a new and authoritative view of a hugely influential artist who has been at the forefront of British art for over twenty years. The volume is published with three different covers.

The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet.

One day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she's been left with after she's spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom:

'Curlew or curfew? You choose.'

And what's any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago?

Ali Smith's novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.

Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across... A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers 'acting on a tip-off' and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape... An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery - first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking - writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention... These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe's new underclass - its refugees. While those with "citizenship" enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain's policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims' stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014 WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD 'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance. ***** 'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph 'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton 'A delight. A masterpiece. Magical' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014 SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.

Discover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right now All four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer A Book of the Year according to: the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Evening Standard, The Times. 'Dazzling' Daily Telegraph 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.