Where to Start with Ali Smith: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Ali Smith — whether to begin with How to Be Both, Autumn, or Hotel World. A complete reading guide to the Scottish novelist.
Ali Smith (born 1962) is the Scottish novelist and short story writer who has established herself as one of the most formally inventive and politically alert writers in contemporary British fiction. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for How to Be Both (2014), a formally daring novel that exists in two different editions with narratives in different orders. Her Seasonal Quartet — Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), Summer (2020) — was written and published in near-real time response to the Brexit period, with each novel appearing within a year of the events that shaped it. Her fiction is distinguished by its linguistic playfulness, its formal imagination, and its insistence on the political as personal.
Where to Start: How to Be Both (2014)
The essential Smith — her most celebrated novel and the most complete demonstration of her gifts. It consists of two narratives printed in different orders in different editions: some readers encounter the story of Francesco del Cossa, a Renaissance painter working in fifteenth-century Ferrara who may be female, first; others encounter George, a contemporary teenage girl in Cambridge who is grieving her mother, first. The ordering matters — the novel has two different arguments depending on which way round you read it — and Smith leaves the choice to chance.
The novel is simultaneously a formal experiment, a ghost story of sorts (Francesco haunts George and vice versa), and one of the most honest accounts of adolescent grief in contemporary British fiction. The Renaissance sections, in Francesco’s invented but historically plausible voice, are a remarkable achievement. Her most fully realised and most immediately moving novel.
Autumn (2016)
The first of the Seasonal Quartet — and Smith’s most directly political novel. Set in the autumn of 2016, in the months immediately after the Brexit referendum, it follows Elisabeth Demand, a young woman, as she visits her childhood neighbour Daniel Gluck, a hundred-year-old man who is dying and dreaming in a care home. The novel moves between their past friendship — Daniel read her everything, showed her how art worked, gave her a world larger than the one she was born into — and the post-referendum present, in which Britain has divided in ways it cannot articulate.
The fastest-written of Smith’s novels (completed within months of the referendum) and the one in which the urgency of the response is most palpable. Short, formally elegant, and genuinely moving. The best entry for readers who want Smith’s most accessible and most immediate work.
Reading Ali Smith
Smith’s fiction is united by a belief in the formal possibilities of language — the idea that how a story is told is inseparable from what it means — and by a political commitment to imagining a Britain more capacious and more generous than the one currently on offer. Her novels play with time, with gender, with narrative ordering, with the relationship between art and life; they are simultaneously deeply literary (full of reference to other writers and painters) and directly legible as interventions in the present moment. Begin with How to Be Both for the most celebrated and the most emotionally direct; read Autumn for the most immediately political and the shortest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Ali Smith?
How to Be Both (2014) is the best starting point — Smith's most celebrated and most immediately accessible novel, winner of the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. It consists of two narratives — a Renaissance fresco painter in fifteenth-century Ferrara and a contemporary Cambridge teenager grieving her recently dead mother — printed in different orders in different editions of the book, so that half the readers encounter the Renaissance story first and half encounter the contemporary story first. It is formally inventive in a way that is immediately legible, deeply moving, and the most complete demonstration of Smith's gifts. Autumn is the best alternative for readers who want the shortest and most directly political entry.
What is How to Be Both about?
How to Be Both (2014) consists of two interwoven narratives: one follows Francesco del Cossa, a Renaissance painter working in fifteenth-century Ferrara, who may or may not be female; the other follows George, a contemporary teenage girl in Cambridge who is grieving her suddenly dead mother and who, in her grief, becomes obsessed with one of Francesco's frescoes. The two timelines are printed in different orders in different editions — some readers start with the Renaissance story, others with George — which makes the experience of reading genuinely different depending on which edition you have. The novel's central question is announced in its title: how to be both past and present, alive and dead, oneself and another.
What is the Seasonal Quartet?
The Seasonal Quartet is Ali Smith's four-novel sequence — Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020) — written in response to Brexit and to the seasons of their composition, each published within a year of the events that shaped them. The four novels are interconnected but broadly standalone; each uses a different formal approach to examine Britain in the post-referendum period. Autumn is the first and the most widely read; it is the best entry point for readers who want Smith's most directly contemporary work rather than her more formally ambitious fiction.
Is Ali Smith difficult to read?
Smith's fiction is formally inventive but not conventionally difficult: her prose is playful, allusive, and full of wordplay and literary reference, but she does not withhold meaning in the way that some experimental novelists do. How to Be Both, despite its formal conceit (two narratives, two editions), is emotionally direct and accessible. The Seasonal Quartet novels are shorter and more immediate — Autumn was written and published within months of the Brexit referendum, and its directness of observation reflects that urgency. Readers who appreciate linguistic playfulness and formal imagination will find Smith consistently rewarding; readers who prefer linear narrative may find her work initially surprising.
