A book about the COVID age and what is happening in this age. It's a sort of flush of consciousness and the plot exists but it's a sort of general picture that contains a lot of remarks.
Racism, climate change, health politics.
Ali Smith is a master storyteller and this is an excellent nove.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Ali Smith perfectly captures the times we're living in, and I was so pleased that she wrote this "companion piece" to her seasonal series. Her books should be widely read, particularly in future decades when people study our current era. Thank you for this ARC!

Companion Piece continues the study of modern Britain that Ali Smith captured in her brilliant seasonal novels.
This is as contemporary as you can get; we have NHS staff wearing bin bags as PPE, we have people trying to turn politicians attention to racism and climate change declared as terrorists. Over the last few years there have been a number of changes in the direction of our country and Ali Smith perfectly captures the state of our nation in this novel.
The novel concentrates on Sandy Gray, an artist whose elderly father is in hospital which leaves her looking after his dog Shep. She receives an unexpected call from Martina Pelf who were at university together. Martina works at a museum and has had an unpleasant experience with border control staff while bringing back an artefact (Boothby Lock) back into the country. Martina thinks that Sandy can help her process what happened, although Sandy had very little to do with her at university.
As in the season quartet this novel is multilayered. Major themes of our day are touched upon such as climate change, pandemic, immigration, poverty and gender. Although the novel deals with heavy issues it is a pleasure to read and, as with her other books, there is plenty of puns and wordplay, looking into the origin of words such as hello and gypsy. Just brilliant.

A brilliant “companion piece” to the exemplary Seasonal Quartet.
Once again the author perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the early 2020s whilst also mystifying us with her poetic wordsmithery. Superb stuff.

Companion Piece follows on from Ali Smith’s wonderful Seasons quartet, an attempt to write and publish in ‘real-time’, reflecting on the current events while encompassing larger themes of history, art, memory, nature, humanity. And while in some ways, it feels like a coda, a concluding part to the quartet, it can also be read as a standalone novel.

Sandy Gray, ‘Shifting Sands’ is an artist who layer-paints poems and novels, superimposing words on top of each other to discover new meanings. With her elderly father hospitalised for a heart condition, Sandy walks his ancient dog Shep and spends days in the hospital car park, her visits very limited due to Covid. One day she gets an unexpected call from Martina Pelf, they were at university together although not friends. Martina, now assistant curator at a museum had a particularly unpleasant and surreal experience at customs while bringing an artefact back from an exhibition abroad. As she struggles to process it, she thinks Sandy could help. Within days, Sandy’s house has been invaded by the Pelfs, first Martina’s two grown up daughters then the husband and Sandy moves to her father’s house, all the while thinking about her relationship with her father, the past, the present and the future. The final part of the novel, similar to How To Be Both, is a story from medieval plague times about a young female blacksmith who may or may not have created Martina’s artefact.

Anyone who has read Ali Smith before can, from this summary, pick up on the themes prevalent in her work I think. Just as Sandy’s paintings are multi-layered, so is the novel, with word play and puns, multiple meanings and associations. Smith engages with the present, the inertia of the lockdowns, climate change, homelessness, immigration, gender identity through both parts of the novel, the present echoing the past. One way in which she addresses this is through branding – the physical ‘V’ for ‘vagrant’ branded into someone’s skin of the past to ‘CELINE’ embossed handbag one of the Pelf twins sports and ‘they/them’ written in a sharpie on the other twin’s T-shirt. Sandy’s nickname ‘Shifting Sands’ stuck from university days for “The way you knew how to think about things that everybody more normal would dismiss as a bit off the planet” as Marina tells her. I couldn’t help but feel that Companion Piece was autofictional in some ways.

Although the novel deals with some heavy themes, it is also exuberant and a pleasure to read. Not least the wonderful aside on the meaning of ‘hello’ or its messy, inventive structure and its underlying hopefulness and optimism. By the end of it, I was quite helplessly in tears.

My thanks to Penguin, Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Companion Piece.

Having read and reflected on Smith’s seasonal quartet, all written in near real-time to current events and yet all timeless too, I was delighted to receive the aptly-named Companion Piece. Smith’s work is always an education, and this one combined her trademark wordplay with fairies, blacksmithing, Insta and dogs. A treat, as ever!

I liked this but I really want to see what will happen if Ali Smith takes her time with a novel, as opposed to pumping out one per year. This read like jazz to me, improvisational, and not really interested in tying up loose threads. Like:<spoiler>what ended up happening to the Pelf home invaders? Did she just stay in her father's house? Why did she have the vision of the blacksmith in her house? Did the blacksmith make the lock?</spoiler> Smith is obviously not interested in explaining everything but as a reader I was left craving a bit more narrative satisfaction. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Not surprisingly, this is an immense, dazzling work!
Themes: NHS, politics, immigration, Covid, gender, the plague, history, nature, the outsider, stories, books, loss.
It’s a beautiful piece about people, the power of love and relationships, all while surviving the seasons. It deals in reality and hallucination, while playing with words, grammar and language.
It’s full of emotion with a bendy, slippy feeling which is destabilising - but along with fear and despair, it’s playful, funny and hopeful.
This resonates:
“Books are important because they’re one of the ways we can imagine ourselves otherwise”
And shouldn’t we all be doing that?
It’s an utter joy!
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

Very much business as usual for Ali Smith in this companion piece to her earlier seasons quartet, a short, sometimes witty, often astute and insightful although sometimes not, look at society during the pandemic. Very much of the moment and many of the central protagonist’s comments and aperçus will strike a chord with the reader – familiar ground after two years of lockdown and vaccinations. There are the usual wide-ranging literary allusions and word play – for Smith is above all a true wordsmith – but occasionally it all felt a bit heavy-handed. Sandy is an artist, whose father is in hospital, and she is invaded by a rather strange family consisting of an old college friend and her twin daughters, whom Smith treats with satire and derision – probably deserved but I’m not sure exactly what she was trying to say with this depiction of two modern young girls. Then there’s a long fable-like story within the story – something I’m never a fan of – about a woman blacksmith from the Middle Ages, and this seemed peripheral to the main narrative. Or maybe I just didn’t get it. I enjoyed the book, but with reservations, and found it lacked the coherence of her earlier quartet. I liked it but certainly didn’t love it.

I guess I can see how Ali Smith might divide opinion. I have read each of her last 5 books and for me she resembles an artist whose speciality is different kinds of word conjuring, employing sleight of hand to pluck the most elegant of phrases out of thin air, a verbal magician in an indefinable category of her own. There are times I am sure I don't understand every allusion - or illusion? - she is drawing, and wonder if I am following all the threads that are being teased and looped and woven back and forth, but on those occasions I just let it flow, her writing verging on acerbic poetry, all rhythms and cadence and funny wordplay that I don't really find elsewhere. There's no bigger compliment I can come up with than to say that I really can't think of any other writer quite like her.

Is Companion Piece very good? Yes. Will Companion Piece find a new readership for those who find her work difficult to pin down or oddly elusive? One imagines probably not.

There is a plot wending its way through Companion Piece but for me it won't be the narrative strands that persist. This latest book is very much in the vein of the previous four novels which made up her Seasonal Quartet and I felt I was in that same literary universe, one largely drawn from the recent 'Covid-mundane' world we've all experienced though liberally spliced with some hallucinatory/historical 'time travel'. She makes writing look embarrassingly easy and yet I'm sure when you put her text under a microscope it's full of words that have been worked, beaten into shape and reforged many times over by an erudite blacksmith (Ali Smith?) every inch the equal of one of the book's most memorable and inscrutable characters. (If you've read it, you'll know who I mean.)

I had high expectations; they were met. Roll on the next one.

With thanks to Penguin and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchanged for an unbiased review.

Only Ali Smith can write such high brow literary fiction and make it so readable. Companion Piece is the story of Sand, whose father is ill and hospitalised, getting a fall from a long-forgotten university acquaintance who wants to tell her a story for analysis, and gets another story from Sand in return. But it’s also about language and fairytales and Covid and humour and somehow medieval blacksmiths? This is the second novel Smith’s published set during locked-down pandemic times and that didn’t bother me at all, confirming that Ali Smith can do things that nobody else can. Companion Piece is the fifth part of a four-part series so one can only hope there’s more to come.

I have to caveat this review by saying that I love Ali Smith, have read everything she has ever produced and absolutely loved the Seasonal Quartet. Companion piece is a companion to the seasonal quartet and like the four books it compliments, it is quite brilliant.

I could wax lyrical about this book for ever and a day, I was both excited and nervous about reading this book, as I felt bereft when I finished Summer, so was delighted a companion was published, but anxious that it may not live up to my expectations. I needn't have worried, because this book is brilliant. Ali Smith's writing is sublime, it is a joy to read her books and this is no exception. She captures the spirit of the times we live in to perfection and I think this and the seasonal quartet will be read in the future to explain the things we have all lived through, it is perceptive, astute, and quite brilliant!

Nothing I write will do this book justice, I have recommended this and the seasonal quartet to everyone I know, I have the beautiful hardcovers sitting on my shelf and I will love these books for ever.

If you haven't read these books, please do they are fabulous.

I was expecting huge things from this book, and unfortunately it just wasn’t for me. I enjoyed parts but most of the time I just didn’t understand what was going on.

General Impressions

I requested "Companion Piece" on a whim after seeing Ali Smith's name around without ever dreaming I would be approved so I could not believe my eyes when I got it in the mail.

This was my first work by Ali Smith and I truly understand why she is so loved. This was not a book that might easily be reviewed, as it is a work of art, and will speak to everyone differently.

I read this book in a matter of hours, I simply could not stop myself. This book reminded me a bit of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich in that it's very much a product of these last couple of years and it will be a record of it forever. It features, ghosts, the pandemic, is narrated by someone pushed to the edge of society and themes such as racism, economic inequality, discrimination, xenophobia and pandemic deniers.

As well as Covid, this book also features the Black Plague and traces a parallel between the aftermath of it, serving almost as a warning of what is already happening, which was informative and chilling but it also features characters finding peace and choosing to be kind on the face of cruelty.

Thank you to Penguin and Hamish Hamilton for sending me this proof.

Rating: 5/

Like the seasonal quartet this book is as close as possible to current times and our current experience. It is set in the middle of lockdown, but is also in two parts, like Smith's earlier How to be Both. There is a story within a story set in the time of the black death - the parallels are obvious and Smith illustrates how the issues that affect us now are not new. There are similar themes to the seasons books too as one character, Martina, describes being pulled over by customs officials and locked in a windowless room.

It is a beautiful book, but slippery. I was left with a lot of questions and thoughts at the end. But as one character says 'a story is never an answer. A story is also a question' and Smith declines to give us a tidy satisfying tale, but one that leaves ideas and thoughts that have stayed with me.

I was pleased to read this as it the title suggests it is a companion piece to her seasonal quartet which I have previously read and enjoyed. This book is a stand alone and a much shorter story in itself. I really enjoyed the writing, as Ali Smith really is master of her craft but in terms of the story I found I lost myself in places as I wasn’t quite sure how some of the elements tied together.

A charming, engrossing novel from Ali Smith which builds on her previous works capturing the moment in time that is COVID. I adore Ali Smith's dialogue and slight surreal writing style, this creates an astute and sharp observation of modern times. A beautifully readable commentary on society.

What a wonderful book. It is hard to categorise and is full of cruelty and beauty. I had a story that it was written in one sitting, like peeling an apple in one go. I felt a real sense of connection and community in the main story between solitary Sandy Gray and her old acquaintance Martina with her strange family. In our time of lockdowns it showed me how people behave and what they can mean to each other. The cover is beautiful too.

As the name – and cover – suggest, Companion Piece isn't simply Smith's next full-length work after her recent Seasonal Quartet, but an accompaniment to it. Yet for all that it's 'about' the pandemic in terms of timeline and a plot that begins as narrator Sandy's father enters NHS hospital care at the height of lockdown, this tender, incandescent novel is very much its own thing. Tightly knotted in wordplay and plot, it serves as warning and reminder that all of this - for good and bad – has passed before. Magnificent.

An exquisitely beautiful and imaginative novel by Ali Smith that appears to defy easy comprehension that revisits and builds on themes and issues from her previous works. This multilayered narrative carries more than a little of the qualities of surrealism and insanity that reflect our personal experiences of our contemporary realities, providing us with an astutely observed social and political commentary, a picture of the sorry state of our nation. Through the artist Sandy Gray, it draws on the pandemic, and focuses on companions, with literary and poetry references, a strange lock and key mystery and so much more. There are connections and the presence of the ordinary alongside the extraordinary, and is brimming with rage and fury at the widespread pain and sorrow we have endured, created by an incompetent government lacking compassion.

The offbeat and fragmentary, mosaic like nature of the novel may not appeal to some readers but for me it has charm and engages, the author is a talented wordsmith who delights, whilst highlighting that the trees continue to press in on us as we try to navigate our way out of the woods. I feel this is a book that will reward rereads. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.