The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?

From the bestselling author of Autumn and Winter , as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to be Both , comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet

Having captured the chaos and catharsis of the dying embers and slumbering promise of Autumn and Winter in 2017 and 2018, Ali Smith turns to new beginnings for the third novel in her peerless seasonal quartet. Interweaving mythical, ancient and primal ideas about the years’ changing faces with a startling immediacy that is fresh, funny and poignant Spring captures - wholly and ineffably – the moment we are in.

MEDIA REVIEWS

‘...while reading Spring, I became suddenly aware of the extraordinary meta-novel – the year – that the quartet will form once it’s complete, and how thrilling and important that book will be’ - The Guardian

'Like a modernist prose poem that hints at a deeper, unified conclusion to the series.' - The Financial Times

'She tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to.' - The Times

Praise for the Seasonal Quartet:

'Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, and all the dimensions of love. It's a case not so much of reading between the lines as of being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way.' - Deborah Levy on Autumn

'The novel of the year is obviously Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain.' - Olivia Laing, Observer on Autumn

'Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days... Combining brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art.' - NPR on Winter

'Rank[s] among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present.' - The Financial Times on Winter

'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised... Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain... Luminously beautiful.' - The Observer on Winter