Companion Piece

Description

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE*

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 quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.

Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE*

One of:
The New York Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2022”
Financial Times’ “books to mark for 2022”
Daily Mail’s “stellar picks for high brow and low”
The Irish Times’ “books to look out for in 2022”
Evening Standard’s “best fiction books to look forward to in 2022”
The National (UK)’s “most exciting books coming out in 2022”
The Guardian (UK)’s “highlights for the year ahead”
iNews’s “reasons to be excited about the approach of 2022”
New Statesman’s fiction picks for “what to read in 2022”
Waterstones’ “fiction you need to read in 2022”
Book Bar’s “2022 must-reads”
The New Statesman’s “15 best books for summer”
Publishers Weekly’s “Best Fiction Books 2022”

Praise for Companion Piece:

“[T]ouching entertainment. . . . [Companion Piece] is Smith’s pandemic land, where myth and reality converse, where lockdown might evoke medieval artisanry, and where wordplay is more than playful. The Scottish author’s 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands. . . . With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress. A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Smith’s expansive and tantalizing spin-off of her Seasonal Quartet series blends stories of mythology, English history, and personal trauma. . . . As ever, Smith’s flawless stream-of-conscious narration is at once accessible and transforming, and with it she manages to contain eye-blinking hallucinatory images, such as a shattered clock that reconstitutes itself. This is a captivating Rubik’s cube of fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[S]uperb. . . . [Companion Piece is] itself a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it. . . . [A] remarkable novel.”
—The New York Times
 
“A lockdown story of wayward genius. . . . Lyrical visions alternate with fables and farce, history with Co-vid, in the scheme-busting fifth part of Smith’s seasonal quartet. . . . Companion Piece is shapely, but not conclusive. It doesn’t feel like a coda to the Four Seasons tetralogy, rather an addition to a book sequence for all seasons, with no end in sight. Smith could carry on adding to the writerly collage she is creating through many more volumes. I hope she does.”
—The Guardian

“[L]yrical and timely. . . . Smith’s novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don’t want to.”
—TIME

“Think of [Companion Piece] as a B-side to the seasonal quartet—more up-to-the-minute observations of our confusing world, more playful language to get lost in.”
—Evening Standard

“In [Companion Piece], Smith promises to capture the present time with a bold spirit while looking to the future.”
—The National (UK)

“This entertaining follow-up to the Scottish novelist’s ripped-from-the-headlines Seasonal Quartet offers a wry look at millennial mores. . . . Ali Smith’s Companion Piece is a glorious snapshot of society in 2022.”
—The Telegraph (UK)

“Companion Piece is best experienced as a coda to the Seasonal Quartet, yet it can also be read as a standalone book. . . . Smith is a celebrator of the paradox, of the cyclical nature of death and birth, endings and beginnings. . . . The implicit and explicit messages Smith is delivering through Companion Piece, as with the Seasonal Quartet, are that interconnectedness and community can triumph over disaffection and disconnection. Those are themes that do not date; a reminder in perilous times of the need for Smith’s wise, humane, and generous voice—and the angry consolation her work provides.”
—Financial Times

“[A] scintillating story. . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful, and mysterious.”
—The Guardian

“It wouldn’t be an Ali Smith novel without linguistic fireworks; increasingly nor would it be one without a sense of moral indignation. Companion Piece is, to use the Smith cliché lexicon, “characteristically unclassifiable”, “predictably unpredictable” and “as freewheeling as a rollercoaster”. She is in grave peril of becoming a national treasure.”
—The Scotsman

“[S]ensational. . . . Companion Piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements.”
—Esquire

“[A]n entertaining portrait of the world we live in. In [Companion Piece], Smith skillfully evokes the grim monotony of pandemic life.”
—The Week
 
“Writing with a sharp wit and equally sharp tongue, Smith shifts between reality and vision. . . . In Companion Piece, [she] continues to ask the most important questions of our time.”
—The Herald

“In her new novel Companion Piece, Smith turns the legacy of Joyce and Woolf into vital fiction for the 21st century.”
—The New Statesman

“[S]uperb. . . . [Companion Piece is] itself a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it. . . . [A] remarkable novel.”
—The New York Times
 
“Companion Piece is like the ancient lock with which it began: turning the key is only the beginning of understanding. Smith’s bountiful allusions, references, and subtle connections require more than one reading for their full meaning to emerge. A deceptively slender novel, where every line is freighted, it is like the lock when it was hammered into shape. Forged in a blazing heat, tempered by skill, it is an impressive work of art.”
—The Herald
 
“In her latest novel, wordsmith nonpareil Ali Smith once again shows herself to be a master of forging inventive connections. Companion Piece helps us see our world in a different light by finding points of contact between two plagues and two female artists, five centuries apart. . . . One of Smith’s great gifts as a writer is verbal playfulness—a joy of lex—even in dark times. . . .  Ever intent on expanding our understanding of others and the world we share, Smith’s work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful—and never irrelevant.”
—NPR

“Ali Smith’s Companion Piece is a novel for people who love language.”
—The Washington Post

“With its sweeping and incisive vision, its proof that you can trap lightning in a bottle, Companion Piece shares the best qualities with the quartet to which it plays companion, offering a clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, [Smith] also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Smith, as usual, revels in wordplay—darting from curlew to curfew; multi-headed Cerberus to the father’s dog—and evokes a sense of interconnectedness in an age of isolation.”
—The Straits Times
 
“In Companion Piece, Ali Smith has offered her readers a new gift. . . . [She] delights in unpacking the complex history of words, hinting at the dangerous consequences of our desire to label people. . . . this story . . .  gleams with moments of compassion. . . . [Smith] keeps us hoping.”
—The Big Issue

“Ali Smith has built her precious, sharp prowess as a wordsmith into something of a legend. Her short novel . . . is another joy: a rewardingly demanding, disparate exploration of companionship and the state of the world, burning with crisp-cut language and moving from subjects like pandemics to mythology.”
—VIVA (New Zealand)

“[A] book that thrums with the same rage and artistic energy as its predecessors. . . . Taking in Covid and the Black Death, gender identity and violence against women, it’s another superlative novel from one of our very best writers.”
—The Guardian

“[Companion Piece] is an ode to the beauty of human failings, perpetual crisis and the evasiveness of the answers that we seek.”
—The Telegraph

“Through wordplay, Smith tests what a ‘pandemic novel’ and a ‘pandemic author’ might be. With equal parts humility and wonder, Smith celebrates the ways that literature’s community has grown. Situating herself in history, she invites us to co-create a more inclusive world through language. In a word, Smith is a wordsmith.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“The finely cadenced prose [in Companion Piece] is completely alive on the page, with themes that are subtly executed and an unforgettable story that is unlocked from the past and speaks to the present. A finely tuned mechanism of a book of virtuosic playfulness.”
—Kapka Kassabova, author of Border and ElixirALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public Library and Other Stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has been shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.US

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