Bøger af Ali Smith

A Guardian Best Book of the 21st CenturySHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERA breathtakingly inventive new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both 'The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith's Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain' Observer 'Humour, grace, solace... A light-footed meditation on mortality, mutability and how to keep your head in troubled times' Guardian'Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love' Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk and The Cost of LivingAutumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.How about Autumn 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. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.Here comes Autumn.

Det er et umage venskab, Daniel Gluck og Elisabeth Demand har. Daniel er 101 år gammel, og Elisabeth er 32. I fortællingens nutid, umiddelbart efter Brexit-afstemningen, møder Elisabeth trofast op på det plejehjem, hvor Daniel ligger og venter på at dø. For mange år siden, da de mødtes i 1993, advarede hendes mor hende om at pleje kontakt med den mærkelige nabo, der var flyttet ind over for dem. Men Elisabeth nægter at rette sig efter moderen, og ud af den insisteren på relationer mellem mennesker vokser et venskab, som forfatteren Ali Smith bruger som udgangspunkt for sin fortælling om England af i dag. Efterår er første bog i en kvartet af Ali Smith. Næste udgivelse, Vinter, udkommer i begyndelsen af 2019.

En oktoberdag tager Richard, en desperat ældre filminstruktør, toget fra London til Kingussie. Der møder han Brit, en ung kvinde, der arbejde i et center for illegale migranter og flygtninge. Hun er rejst mod højlandet i selskab med en 12-årig pige. Pigen, der kalder sig Florence, nægter at sige, hvor hun kommer fra, og har en imponerende evne til at få det, hun vil have, og gøre sig usynlig for dem, der står i vejen for hende. Forår er en umulig fortælling om en umulig tid. Ali Smith skriver poetisk og politisk om umenneskelighed, men også om håb og værdighed, som stadig findes. Hun lader forårslyset sive ind. Forår er tredje selvstændige roman i Ali Smiths store årstidskvartet.

Vinter er en roman om en dysfunktionel jul i en dysfunktionel familie i et dysfunktionelt England i en dysfunktionel verden. Sophie Cleves er vor tids Ebenezer Scrooge. Sur og gammel bor hun i en kæmpe villa og er, som hendes søster Iris noterer sig, typen, der ikke har andet at servere til jul end valnødder og et halvt glas med glaserede kirsebær. Netop julen står for døren i hjemmet med de femten soveværelser, og sønnen Arthur kommer på besøg. Med sig har han den Shakespeare-elskende, kroatiske studerende Lux, som han har samlet op ved et busstoppested og betaler for at spille sin kæreste i helligdagene. Og kort efter ankommer så også Sophies søster, der netop er vendt hjem fra Grækenland, hvor hun har hjulpet migranter i land. Vinter er bog i Ali Smiths kvartet. Den første er Efterår, der udkom i august 2018.

These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe s new underclass its refugees. While those with citizenship enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their experiences anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims stories in Chaucers Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

Som hun har for vane har Ali Smith begået en legende men også alvorlig og bevægende roman hvor intet helt er som det ser ud. Det er to historier der slynger sig ind og ud af hinanden en lag på lag-fortælling lidt som når der under den færdige fresko dukker en oprindelig skitse op. Romanen falder i to dele der kan læses i vilkårlig rækkefølge som selvfølgelig giver en meget forskellig oplevelse så det er i den grad op til læserne selv at vælge hvor de vil begynde. Francesco del Cossa der godt nok er født kvinde men lever som mand kæmper for at skabe sig et navn som fresko-maler i renæssancens Italien. Han bliver hyret til en opgave i Este-familiens nybyggede Palazzo Schifanoia i Ferrara. Her skal han sammen med andre malere lave tolv paneler i fresko allegorier over årets måneder. Fem hundrede år senere står Francesco foran sit portræt af Sankt Vincent Ferrer på National Gallery i London og ser en dreng (eller er det en pige?) stå og studere det. I vores tids Cambridge sørger en ung teenagepige Georgia kaldet George over sin nyligt afdøde mor. Hun tænker på sin mors særheder hendes overbevisning om at hun blev overvåget af sikkerhedstjenesten hendes krøllede hjerne og ordspil hendes distancerende ironi. Hun tænker på hendes kærlighed til George og hendes lillebror og deres liv sammen. Hun mindes dengang de var på ferie i Ferrara og så de smukke freskoer i Palazzo Schifanoia Paladset som jager kedsomheden på flugt . Ali Smith (f. 1962) debuterede i 1995 med den prisbelønnede novellesamling Free Love and Other Stories. Hun har været finalist til Booker-prisen og Orange-prisen to gange og blev tildelt Whitbread-prisen for romanen The Accidental (dansk oversættelse En fremmed flytter ind 2006). På dansk udkom senest romanen I MILES OMKREDS (2013).

I 1500-tallets England strejfer en forældreløs pige rundt. Det er mørke tider: epidemier raser, brutalitet og barbari råder. Pigen kommer i lære hos en kvindelig smed, og det er netop smedekunsten og et uventet venskab, der holder hende oppe.Femhundrede år senere har en ny epidemi ramt England og verden. Sandy Gray, en billedkunstner midt i livet, frygter at smitte sin skrøbelige far, der er indlagt efter et slagtilfælde. Derfor vil hun heller ikke se nogen mennesker, hun har i det hele taget besluttet sig for at melde sig ud af samfundet. Indtil hun modtager et mystisk opkald fra en fjern bekendt. Kvinden i røret har brug for Sandys hjælp til at løse en gåde, der hænger sammen med en gammel lås, smedet i senmiddelalderen.ANDRE TIDER er en livsbekræftende lovprisning af fællesskab. En både modig og menneskeklog, rørende og provokerende roman, som indkapsler samtiden og indfanger fortiden. Legesygt og lysende viser Ali Smith, hvordan verden hænger sammen, og hvordan en krisetid påvirker os mennesker – på godt og ondt.ANDRE TIDER er en fritstående roman og samtidig et lyrisk og visionært følgebrev til Årstidskvartetten, der tog verden med storm. ***”Et lysende, underholdende og klogt portræt af den verden, vi lever i.” – The Telegraph“ANDRE TIDER er, som livet selv; rodet, underholdende, sørgelig, smuk og fuld af mystik.” – The Guardian

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARDWINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014NOMINATED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening StandardHow to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTIONA masterful, exuberant novel from the acclaimed author of How to be both and the ongoing Seasonal quartet 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson 'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open from the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times'Hotel World is essential reading from a major talent' IndependentFive people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . .

A collection of flash- and micro-fictions gathered together by National Flash-Fiction Day 2012. Includes stories from Ian Rankin, Vanessa Gebbie, Jenn Ashworth, Tania Hershman, David Gaffney, Trevor Byrne, Jen Campbell, Jonathan Pinnock, Calum Kerr, Valerie O'Riordan and many more. 62 tales spanning different genres, styles and themes, but all beautifully crafted in just a few well-chosen words.

Captain O is a pirate with a heart of gold. Read his adventures as he sails the seven seas, has adventures on land and sea and in space, often having to choose between making a friend or making a fortune. Captain O and the mermaid is the first book in a series of 20.

The new novel by one of the most outstanding authors of the last decades. Ali Smith dazzles us with Fragua, a book that closes the famous seasonal Quartet. One day, in post-Brexit Britain and in the midst of the pandemic, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from a college acquaintance, Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy for help with a mysterious question she's been asked after spending half a day locked in a room by border control officers for no reason she can understand... Jumping back in time, Fragua features the story of a blacksmith who made beautiful pieces centuries ago and who was persecuted and marked. A story of restrictions and a fight for freedom that is intertwined with the story of Sandy thanks to an exceptional lock created by the blacksmith and which comes into the hands of Martina Pelf. A hopeful novel, which can be read as a coda to the famous Seasonal Quartet, in which Ali Smith brings us again an intelligent and moving novel, thoughtful and playful.

O brave new world, that has such people in't.Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.What does it mean?It's a truism of our time that it'll be the next generation who'll sort out our increasingly toxic world.What would that actually be like?In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?And what's a horse got to do with any of this?Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.'As always, Ali's inventiveness and intelligence lit fireworks in my mind. Gliff is an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world' Michelle de Kretser

"When we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma--a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by. And then there is Ash, a fiery Scottish actresss who cannot shake her demons--chief among them an unrequited passion for Amy that has obsessed her ever since they met as teenagers. Like is the story of two parallel lives that intersect briefly, then diverge. It is also a timeless evocation of adolescence and its agonizing anticipations, its contradictory yearnings for freedom and safety, its blind quest for mastery over pleasure and pain. Deftly constructed, passionately imagined, Like is a remarkable debut from a powerful talent"--

A collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one hundred years since his deathFranz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation, adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes - and very few artists in any field have created work that captures so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence.What happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of anxiety attacks, these specially commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

From the astonishingly talented writer of "The Accidental "and "Hotel World "comes Ali Smith's brilliant retelling of Ovid's gender-bending myth of Iphis and Ianthe, as seen through the eyes of two Scottish sisters. "Girl Meets Boy "is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, and the absurdity of consumerism, as well as a story of reversals and revelations that is as sharply witty as it is lyrical. Funny, fresh, poetic, and political, "Girl Meets Boy "is a myth of metamorphosis for a world made in Madison Avenue's image, and the funniest addition to the "Myths" series from Canongate since Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad."

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartetOne day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she's been left with after she's spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom:'Curlew or curfew? You choose.'And what's any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago?Ali Smith's novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.'[An] entertaining and expert portrayal of the world we live in, seen by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences' Telegraph'[Companion piece] makes you look at the world afresh. For me, it turned a cold and depressing day into a bright one' New StatesmanLONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022

"This story of three men's work helping traumatized kids in one of America's most underserved cities reveals how mindfulness tools can help children and communities not only survive but thrive"--

"From the Man Booker Prize shortlisted-author of the brilliant Seasonal Quartet series-a major new novel that promises to capture the present moment with Ali Smith's genius and bold spirit. "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 Seasonal Quartet, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms. Companion Piece stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith's groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times. 'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.'"--