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.
Why How to Be Both Is an Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Ali Smith, How to Be Both is an ideal first book because it is among her most celebrated and characteristic novels and a full expression of her distinctive gifts, the combination of formal inventiveness, playful intelligence, and emotional depth. How to Be Both is a novel in two halves, one following a Renaissance painter and one a contemporary teenager, printed in different orders in different copies so that readers may encounter them in either sequence, a formally inventive structure that embodies the novel’s themes of doubleness and perspective. As an entry point, it offers a full expression of Smith’s gifts, the formal inventiveness, the playful and serious intelligence, and the emotional depth and warmth that mark her work. It welcomes the newcomer with its inventive structure, its intelligence, and its emotional resonance, drawing the reader into a formally daring and deeply human novel. It is among her most celebrated novels and a fine representation of her gifts, so that the new reader encounters Smith at her most characteristic. For the newcomer, then, How to Be Both is an excellent starting point.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect How to Be Both to be a formally inventive, intelligent, and emotionally resonant novel. You can expect formal inventiveness, for the novel is told in two halves, one following a Renaissance painter and one a contemporary teenager, printed in different orders in different copies so that readers may encounter them in either sequence, a daring structure that embodies the novel’s themes. You can expect playful and serious intelligence, for Smith combines a playful, inventive wit with a serious engagement with art, time, perception, and grief. You can expect emotional depth and warmth, for beneath the formal play the novel is deeply human, exploring loss, love, art, and connection with genuine feeling. You can expect a distinctive voice and a fluid, lyrical style. You should expect an inventive novel that rewards the reader open to its formal daring and its play with structure and perspective. Expect, in short, a formally inventive, intelligent, and emotionally resonant novel, a distinctive introduction to Smith’s gifts.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once How to Be Both has introduced you to Smith’s gifts, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore her other fiction, particularly her acclaimed Seasonal quartet, which continues her formal inventiveness, her playful intelligence, and her engagement with the present moment. Her Seasonal quartet, a series of novels responding to contemporary events and the passage of time, exemplifies her gift for combining formal inventiveness, emotional depth, and timely engagement with the world, while her other novels and stories continue her distinctive style. Reading these after How to Be Both deepens your appreciation of Smith’s distinctive gifts, the formal inventiveness, the playful and serious intelligence, and the emotional depth and warmth that mark her work. Her characteristic qualities run through her fiction, and the reader who has been moved by How to Be Both will find them across her work. Building your reading journey through Smith’s work is a matter of following her inventive, humane fiction from How to Be Both into her Seasonal quartet and her other novels. The reader who begins with How to Be Both and continues through her work will find one of the most inventive and humane novelists of her generation.
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.
