Autumn

Post-Brexit

September 2016. The referendum was three months ago. Britain is sorting itself into two versions of itself — Leave and Remain — and the government is beginning to understand what it has set in motion. Elisabeth Demand, a lecturer in art history, visits Daniel Gluck, who is 101 and sleeping in a care home. He may be dying.

Smith’s novel moves between this present moment and the past: Elisabeth’s childhood, when Daniel was her neighbour and introduced her to the wider world through pop music, film, and books; their conversations across the years. Daniel, in his dreamlike state, also moves through his own past — a childhood in the 1930s, a life lived across the disruptions of the 20th century.

The Seasonal Project

Autumn is the first of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, each novel written and published within months of the preceding season: Winter (2017), Spring (2019), Summer (2020). The project is unusual in contemporary fiction — a four-novel sequence written in near-real-time response to a specific political moment (Brexit and its aftermath).

The ambition is to capture something that more considered, retrospective fiction will miss: the texture of the confusion, the specific quality of the anger and grief, before it becomes historical distance. Autumn is the beginning of that project.

Pauline Boty and the Buried Story

One of Autumn’s quiet acts of recovery is its attention to Pauline Boty, the only prominent female painter of the British Pop Art movement, who died at twenty-eight in 1966 and was then almost entirely forgotten. Elisabeth, an art historian, becomes fascinated by Boty’s work, and Daniel — who knew Boty in his youth — carries memories of her into his dreaming. Smith uses Boty as a counter-melody to the Brexit present: an artist whose vivid, politically alert images of a swinging, hopeful, outward-looking Britain were nearly erased, much as the inclusive idea of the country Smith mourns seems, in 2016, to be slipping away. The novel’s engagement with a real, undervalued woman artist is characteristic of Smith, who returns again and again to figures pushed to the margins of art history, and it gives Autumn a layer of cultural archaeology beneath its topical surface.

The Seasonal Quartet and Smith’s Wager

Autumn is the opening volume of the Seasonal Quartet, a sequence Smith conceived as an experiment in writing fiction at the speed of journalism: each book composed and rushed into print within months of the events it absorbs, the ink barely dry. Winter followed in 2017, Spring in 2019, and Summer in 2020, the last reaching back to gather threads from all three predecessors and to register the early pandemic. The wager behind the project is that a novel written in the heat of a moment can capture textures of feeling — the specific confusion, the rawness of division, the disorientation of watching norms dissolve — that slower, more retrospective fiction inevitably smooths away. Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize, a notable recognition for a book written so fast, and it has since been widely cited as the first significant literary novel of the Brexit era. The trade-off is visible: passages tip occasionally into direct editorialising, and the seasonal architecture is less legible in this first instalment than across the completed quartet. But the urgency is the point, and the freshness of Smith’s response is precisely what dates so little.

Time, Sleep, and the Dickensian Opening

For all its topicality, Autumn is structured around the oldest of literary subjects: time and mortality. Its famous opening line — “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times” — deliberately rewrites Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to strip away the consoling “best,” and from there the novel becomes a meditation on endings of every kind. Daniel sleeps an “increased sleep,” the long doze of the very old, and his dreams fold his century-long life into the present. Around him, the season turns: leaves fall, light shortens, a country settles into a colder mood. Smith braids the literal autumn of the title with the autumn of a life and the autumn of a political idea, so that the personal and the national elegies reinforce one another. The novel is preoccupied with bureaucratic absurdity, too — a long, mordantly funny set-piece in which Elisabeth tries to renew a passport at the post office becomes a small parable of a country tangling itself in checks and refusals. Beneath the comedy and the topical anger runs a steady, generous insistence that imagination, art, and friendship are the resources with which people endure their worst of times.

Approaching the Novel

Autumn is short, fragmentary, and lyrical rather than plot-driven, and readers who come to it expecting a conventional Brexit “state of the nation” novel may be disappointed — its politics live in mood, image, and the tenderness between its two central characters rather than in argument. The friendship between the young Elisabeth and the centenarian Daniel, traced across decades and into his final dreaming, is the emotional engine, and readers willing to follow Smith’s collage of memory, art history, and topical anger will find it moving and quietly hopeful. It rewards those who already enjoy associative, time-shifting fiction, and it serves as the natural entry point for anyone wanting to read the full quartet in sequence. Come to it not for a verdict on Brexit but for the experience of a great stylist taking the emotional temperature of a country in real time.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — The fastest major literary novel written in response to Brexit — Smith finished it months after the referendum. The urgency shows, but so does her formal intelligence. The Daniel and Elisabeth relationship is the novel’s emotional core.

Reading Guides

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