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Companion piece
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  • Published: 7 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241994528
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $26.00

Companion piece

The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of How to be both

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 June 2023
EBook
7 Apr 2022
Audiobook
7 Apr 2022
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The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal Quartet

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 is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now' Observer
  • Published: 7 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241994528
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Ali Smith

Ali Smith's works of fiction include the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her story collections include Free Love, which won a Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and How to be Both, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith lives in Cambridge, England.
AS

Also by Ali Smith

Glyph
Winter
Autumn
Gliff
Let Your Light Shine
Like
Free Love
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Praise for Companion piece

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

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Guardian

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

Alex Preston, 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

Superb, radical, remarkable

Mohsin Hamid, New York 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