“ A beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities ”
Guardian
“ Bravura, brilliant and unsettling . . . leaving you marvelling ”
Financial Times
“ Fantastic ”
Spectator
“ A terrific writer. There is an awful lot to lift the soul, not least Smith's extraordinary playful use of language ”
Daily Mail
“ Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting ”
The Times
“ Bold and brilliant ”
Observer
“ Smith straddles the elegiac and the celebratory through this glorious novel ”
Scotsman
Paperback
9780241973318
September 7, 2017
Hamish Hamilton
208 pages
EBook
9780241973301
October 20, 2016
Penguin eBooks
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature. So an old old man washes up on a shore. He looks like a punctured football with its stitching split, the leather kind that people kicked a hundred years ago. The sea’s been rough. It has taken the shirt off his back; naked as the day I was born are the words in the head he moves on its neck, but it hurts to. So try not to move the head. What’s this in his mouth, grit? it’s sand, it’s under his tongue, he can feel it, he can hear it grinding when his teeth move against each other, singing its sand-song: I’m ground so small, but in the end I’m all, I’m softer if I’m underneath you when you fall, in sun I glitter, wind heaps me over litter, put a message in a bottle, throw the bottle in the sea, the bottle’s made of me, I’m the hardest grain to harvest
to harvest
the words for the song trickle away. He is tired. The sand in his mouth and his eyes is the last of the grains in the neck of the sandglass.
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