Companion piece

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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


'A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.'


Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?

What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?

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.

'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.'

© Ali Smith 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

Superb, radical, remarkable

New York Times

A lockdown story of wayward genius . . . Lyrical visions alternate with fables and farce, history with Covid, in the scheme-busting fifth part of Smith’s seasonal quartet

Guardian

Scintillating . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious

Observer

Both a standalone novel and a coda to her Seasonal quartet, Ali Smith’s latest, set during the pandemic, offers a wise and humane voice for perilous times

Financial Times

Smith’s way of telling a story – looping in time; switching from one fast-flicking consciousness to another; tying up radically different periods of history in a single place – and her amused delight in the flexibilities of language feel not only modernist but, better than that, modern

The New Statesman

Alive to the music and light of language

Washington Post

Smith’s work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful

NPR

Like Smith’s other novels, Companion piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements

Esquire

It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith . . . Smith is intellectually rigorous yet democratic, warm and – crucially – playful

Los Angeles Times

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