Autumn Ali Smith by Ali Smith 9780241973301, 0241973309 instant download after payment.

The first volume of a shape-shifting seasonal quartet from Ali Smith about our time, past time, ageing, love and stories themselves. Seasonal: four standalone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative.

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about autumn in 2016? 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. And the seasons roll round, as ever.  Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art (via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery), Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, and what harvest means.

"Smith’s writing is light and playful, deceptively simple, skipping along like a stone on the surface of a lake, brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope. As Daniel’s sister says to him in a letter from long ago that he recalls in his twilight state, hope is “a matter of how we deal with the negative acts toward human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human.”  -  Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

Ali Smith is the author of several critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and short stories. Hotel World and The Accidental were both shortlisted for the Booker and  Orange Prizes. How to be Both won the Bailey’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.