This was an enjoyable read and I would recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author.

Everything Ali Smith writes is gold, and Autumn isn't any different. A pondering look at Brexit, family and the seasons.

I loved it and will definitely be reading the rest of the seasons.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher.

I did not finish this book as it was not my favourite Ali Smith however I don't want to speak poorly of her work so will not be reviewing it on my YouTube channel

It is the late autumn of life for Daniel Gluck and the autumn of reason for England.

A former refugee child from Germany who survived the war while on a boarding school in England, now a bit over 100 he is deeply delved into his sleep before the big sleep. A film of sensations and figures and stories are running in the front of his closed eyes.

His former child neighbour, Elisabeth Demand, is the only one visiting him. Every day, she reads him from her books she carries with, once from The Brave New World. She also remembers various episodes of the past, especially how her talks with Gluck, once familiar with the rebel artists of the 1960s-1970s, influenced her professional choices.

Torned between past and future, our projections and memories of the memories, we often - if not always - experience the human imprecision of the moment. Our memories are shaped by others, the media impact and context and our subjective personal histories. We may forget names but we keep in mind encounters, or the other way round. Memory in Autumn reminds of one of the well elaborated collages of the pop artists mentioned in the book. Highly selective, random, unfair and a matter of very personal choice after all. What we actually experience as 'present' is the vital outburst of the second, we are rarely fully aware about.

The book is taking place on different temporal layers, which may intertwin, contradict each other or simply go on parallel lanes. Although the story in itself is minimal, and there are maybe too many details of stories wasted into disparate allusions (like the Brexit suggestions which are welcomed for creating the context but not always in my opinion in the right narrative place; I've liked the strong sarcasm of this quote though: 'But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running of the side of a cliff), I've found the temporal exploration both fascinating and revealing. It raises questions about memory and what it is made of, and especially how.

I'm curious to explore the other writings by Ali Smith, and Winter is already waiting on my shelf.

I admit it: I spent two years for reading this ebook by Ali Smith
Autumn: A novel (Seasonal Quartet). My dad died more or less the period I was approved for reading this book and it was in Autumn. I didn't want to think at Autumn too much. Fallen leaves, the end of an existence.
But, apart it, Ali Smith's writing-style, her prose, at first didn't match with me.

Then I discovered a physical proof of: How to be Both. I opened it, I read some pages.Time passed by. You must find a connection with a writer. I found it.

Autumn is the story of Daniel Gluck 101 years old at first dead, later pretty sick and assisted, then vigorous intellectual old man.

In the numerous flashbacks we will discover the friendship, meetings and intellectual talks between Elizabeth and this old man of 85 years old, with which she grew up intellectually with since she was 13 years old.
He will be a constant in her life and this friendship will also mean to her assistance when Dan will fall sick.
Elizabeth starting to be friend with him when a teen-ager instilled in the mind of her mom some doubts regarding this weird friendship, but Elizabeth replied that everything is relative.
Elizabeth and mr.Gluck one day during a walk imagine...
Will you go to college asks him.
The girl replies yes because my mother went to college so this one will be the second generation. Why not?
He mentions a lot of topics...What would you want to study? Math, literature, physics, art...?
A college. A collage. And so let's try to imagine a collage. Later that night Elizabeth thought that "She was chosen by the moment."
Her mother is skeptical. Too old for being a friend that man.

This book was written after the Brexit and here some considerations of the writer who portrays vividly what happened in UK: " All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country people, people felt they'd really lost....All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane....All across the country, promises vanished. All across the country, social media did the job...All across the country, money money money money. All across the country, no money no money no money no money."

Daniel is a man plenty of culture and introduces Elizabeth in the still unknown world of books, music, talents of various genres. He is captivating and their talks are never banal.

One day Daniel will tell Elizabeth: "It is possible to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are."

The hope in this life? According to Daniel: "That the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly."

In a conversation with the mother of Liz Daniel will confirms time travel is real. "We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute." But he will add something else, a constant about human nature: "Not to see what's happening right in front of our eyes."


Stunning. Beautiful. Sad, plenty of poetry.
You'll love it!

Highly recommended.

I thank NetGalley for this ebook!

I have always felt that Ali Smith was an author that I should find out more about but until now had never done anything about it.  Autumn is Smith's seventh novel but is itself only the opening movement of a proposed quartet Seasonal, with Winter already released and a further two volumes promised.  More pertinently however, Autumn is also the first 'Brexit novel', published a mere four months after the referendum and showcasing a fascinating attempt by Smith to write a 'state of the nation' in fiction.  Yet, interviews reveal that Smith had been planning a seasonal sequence of novels for twenty years and that Brexit was more swept up by her writing rather than the other way around.  I came to the book with the feeling of being more than a little late to the party but still pleased that I had finally found my way.

Autumn is a novel preoccupied with time, less about plot and more concerned with the individual experience of existence.  It opens with with Daniel being plunged into a disorientating region outside of time, 'He must be dead, he is surely dead, because his body looks different from the last time he looked down at it, it looks better, it looks rather good as bodies go … But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel.'  Daniel is a century old and as we head back to reality, we realise that he is in a care home, stuck in the 'increased sleep period' which indicates that death is not far away.  Visiting him is Elisabeth, a woman in her early thirties who has known Daniel since she was a child.  She sits by his bedside, she stays with her mother, she is a part time Art History lecturer and in flashbacks we discover how she and Daniel met.

The bond between Elisabeth and Daniel, despite the near-seventy year age gap, is the warmest part of the novel and Smith creates some magnificent dialogue between the pair.  Meeting when the eight year-old Elisabeth moves in next door with her mother, Daniel asks her, 'Your father’s not dead, though? [...] No, Elisabeth said. He’s in Leeds.'  He takes on a mentor role, asking her consistently through the years about what she is reading, telling her 'Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.'  The bond between the two of them is the moral heart of an otherwise rather bleak world.

It is a jolt to read a novel with quite so contemporary a setting.  Elisabeth tells Daniel about the murder of Jo Cox, 'Someone killed an MP,” she tells him. “A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn’t be enough. But it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.'  There are strong and deliberate stylistic parallels between Autumn and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities when it comes to the description of Brexit, 'All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won'.  As Elisabeth reports on her reading choices, Smith makes other sly references to the state of play.

One of the most truly magnificent moments of the novel however came from Elisabeth's increasingly Kafka-esque attempts to renew her passport at the Post Office.  With her application rejected (HEAD INCORRECT SIZE), Elisabeth muses to the man behind the counter on the nature of narrative, 'this notion that my head’s the wrong size in a photograph would mean I’ve probably done or am going to do something really wrong and illegal', then moving on to consider other moments that would be portents of doom within a story, to which the clerk angrily replies that 'This isn't fiction. This is the Post Office', seemingly indicating himself to be beyond even Smith's control.

The question of who tells the story, who in effect controls the narrative, is a central one within Autumn.  Elisabeth rants about how the news simplifies or distorts complex situations.  The characters consistently misinterpret each other (Elisabeth's mother distrusts Daniel as she assumes he must either be gay or a pedophile, Elisabeth and her mother constantly struggle to communicate).  The Brexit referendum is misread as a solution to the refugee crisis.  Elisabeth studies the forgotten pop-artist Pauline Boty and reflects upon the constant cycle of someone being forgotten and then rediscovered.  All the while, Daniel moves in and out of consciousness, in and out of time.

Autumn is a powerful novel, fiercely intelligent but highly aware of that fact.  I was reminded of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française and that similar sense of immediacy in writing, however like the latter, it has a slightly incomplete feel.  It is a snapshot rather than a panorama of Britain, capturing the fractured nation at a vulnerable moment in its history but able to offer few conclusions.  It sums up a mood, but then ... what?  This may be the 'first' post-Brexit novel, but I still was not sure what wisdom Smith was really trying to share on the subject, other than that it had stirred up division.  Maybe Brexit is still too raw a subject for me to be able to accept authors trying to write about it, to explain it neatly - maybe it still seems like too much of a mess.  Or perhaps picking up Smith with one of her experimental pieces did not give me the clearest picture of her style as an author - or just maybe I need to read the rest of the quartet before I make my mind up.  Autumn is a book that is well worth reading now and will probably be equally well worth returning to in a few years to see how far we have come - I am both delighted to have read it and uncertain whether I warmed to it - in short, this is an ideal pick if you happen to be in a book group!

The excellent Ali Smith never disappoints with her beautifully crafted prose that bends meanings to deliver clever constructs. The first installment in a season-based cycle, "Autumn" is no exception, showcasing her unique voice on every page. Set at the hospital bedside of centenarian Daniel Gluck, it sees his former neighbour 30-something Elisabeth, visiting him to read to him and reminisce about her childhood. He was her unlikely babysitter-come-mentor, who seeded in her her passion for art, leading to her career as an art lecturer, with a particular passion for the life and works of Pauline Boty.
This is the first post-Brexit referendum novel I've read, and Ali draws on the division and isolation that it has caused in the country. As Daniel lies on his deathbed, Britain could be seen to be in the same position as it prepares itself for the cold inevitability and loneliness of it's exit from Europe. Winter is coming, it remains to be seen who will survive and to what degree...
A thoughtful, elegiac, mournful piece of writing, that provides a pitch perfect accompaniment to its titular season. I look forward to the next three installments. Smith really is quite an extraordinary talent.

It takes us only a few paragraphs of Autumn (2016) to recognize Ali Smith's characteristic marks: experimental writing; a collage of literary references; a narrative propelled through voice and voice alone; a narrative that mingles past and present, as if they were one thing, happening at once; and, finally, the creative reframing of contemporary topics of discussion. However, compared to her other books, this new novel has a different atmosphere: uneasy, ripe with change; crisp like an Autumn afternoon; and fleeting, like our experience of time. There is a sense of seasons turning, and of decay; a sense of things morphing into something strange, and a sense of rebirth.

The novel opens with a misquote of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”) and a nod to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (“Things. They fall apart.”). We follow the stream of consciousness of a man who has been washed ashore naked, in what seems to be a reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He wonders if he is dead, and is amazed to find out that his body is young again. “But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel.” There seems to be a girl in the beach and, ashamed, he soon covers his body in a suit of leaves (very much like Adam in the Book of Genesis). But we feel that something is amiss here: the man seems to be dreaming, or stuck in limbo. Suddenly, the sun disappears, the girl is gone, and the beach is littered with washed-up corpses, lying amid holidaymakers under parasols – a reference, maybe, to the refugee crisis.

Like someone who is waking up from a dream, we shift to England just after the Brexit vote. The man we had been following is the 101-year-old Daniel Gluck, a German-Jew refugee who lived through the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and is now living in a care home. While he lies unconscious, a 32-year-old woman keeps vigil at his bedside. Elisabeth Demand is a contract junior lecturer in art history at a university in London, “living the dream, her mother says, and she is, if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do.” Elisabeth has known Daniel since she was a child, when she and her mother moved in next door to him. Following her parent’s divorce, the girl soon took to her elderly neighbour, who became her close friend and confidant, introduced her to art, and inspired in her the love of literature.

At Daniel’s bedside, Elisabeth remembers their friendship, reads to him from Brave New World, The Tempest, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and muses about the uneasy current times. The narrative goes back and forth, weaving together Elisabeth’s childhood and early adulthood, along with Daniel’s story. We learn that he lost his younger sister in the Holocaust, and later moved to England, where he became involved in the British pop-art and music scene.

The characters’ story is mingled with that of Pauline Boty, a 1960s British Pop Art artist whose work was largely forgotten after her early death, and was rediscovered in the 1990s. Influenced by Daniel, Elisabeth had written a dissertation on Boty (“There’s next to no critical material,” Elisabeth’s dissertation supervisor tells her in an attempt to dissuade her from writing about Boty. “That’s one of the reasons I think it’d be a particularly good thing to do,” Elisabeth counters”). Boty’s famous painting, Scandal 63, now considered lost, is a reference to the Profumo Affair, a scandal that, as much as the 2016 Brexit campaign, shook the public’s confidence in politics.

Smith's writing style mirrors Boty’s experimental collage techniques – a fragmented style that represents well the way we experience political news online nowadays (“Someone killed an MP, she tells Daniel’s back as she struggles to keep up. A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn’t be enough. But it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff”). Furthermore, Boty’s story symbolizes the guiding principle of Smith's book: the idea of transience, of things disappearing only to appear again later on. Boty is just another artist who was “(…) ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered again years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum.” As in a symphony of discarded things, “(…) the symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness.”

As the first novel in a planned seasonal quartet, Autumn is embedded in transience, memory and time, and in our experience of change. “Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening”. There are references to change as explored by other books: things suffering “a sea-change in to something rich and strange” (The Tempest); “bodies transformed in to shapes of a different kind” (Metamorphoses). Memory is compared to time travel: “We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.”

The past – Daniel? – sleeps through the turmoil of the present, and comes only in distorted fragments (“But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They’re foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless”). As memory retreats into dreamland, the collapse of consensus leaves a void: “It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue.”

What I like about the book is the fact that Smith incorporates uneasiness and conflict for what they are. Instead of preaching, she just looks more closely at the picture ahead, she retraces its inconsistences. “An image of an image means the image can be seen with new objectivity, with liberation from the original”, writes Elisabeth on her dissertation on Boty. That’s a powerful demand of literature and art: to look more closely. I am reminded of the ‘wide-open rose’ of the last scene, and the narrator who points out to the fact that it’s blooming still in the face of the upcoming winter: a thing with many seasons together all at once.

As in Smith's other novels, literature and art (and the books themselves, images of images) are in Autumn fleeting attempts at empathy and mutual comprehension: they are ever-changing places of destroying and rebuilding; places of dissent merging into consensus and back again. Instead of stirring up division, Smith takes a step back to retrace this continuous movement, and the lines where opposites meet. She insists that we remain along these lines, that we do not run away from this necessary and ever-changing place of meeting: the ‘wide-open rose’ right in front of us. “Look at the colour of it.”

How to describe Autumn? The easy answer is that it’s the story of a friendship between a woman and her elderly neighbour. But the easy answer doesn’t do it justice. Autumn is an exploration of friendship, love, aging, identity, art, dying, and the Brexit result. The story jumps between the present day, to how Elisabeth and Daniel met when she was a child and decided to interview him for a school project, to Daniel’s past.

Smith’s prose is stilted, yet poetic. A mess of contradictions much like the immediate aftermath of Brexit itself. I look forward to Winter, Spring and Summer.

She has done it in the past; and she does it again here. Ali Smith’s fixation on, and a visible mastery of, story-telling across timeline, in no particular order, shines in this experimental, breezy novel as well.

Centred around the 30-something Elisabeth Demand and her centenarian friend, Daniel Gluck, Autumn is a long, vibrant, occasionally melancholic, sometimes acerbic but entirely warming season of their friendship. Elisabeth, with a ‘s’, is a history of art professor, whose interest was originally kindled in the subject she currently teaches, by the liberal hours she had spent with Daniel, her then-babysitter. As a genial neighbour to Elisabeth’s busy mother, he had agreed to be her caretaker, and in turn, had relished the artistic discourse with the little Ms. Demand. Fast forward a good twenty plus years and Daniel is now a patient in a day care, under the constant vigil of nurses and in wait of, perhaps, the same palliative cacophony of Elisabeth’s inquisitive murmur.

Throwing light on the two personalities and what edification the many seasons of life imparts, the chapters run forward and backward on the tenuous thread of time. Smith shapes her Elisabeth with a smart countenance, boisterous wit, wry humour and banal gloom.

"The man creases up. It seems he was joking; his shoulders go up and down but no sound comes out of him. It's like laughter, but also like a parody of laughter, and simultaneously a bit like he's having an asthma attack. May be you're not allowed to laugh out loud behind the counter of the main Post Office."

Whether it is the ridiculous bureaucratic hurdles she encounters in her efforts to secure a passport or the disdain she receives at her rebellious choice of thesising on Pauline Boty,Elisabeth comes across as a feisty heroine who is subdued by the autumnal phase of her friend and the dried momentum of her own life. Amidst random allusion to political upheavals in Europe (read Brexit) and the millennium bug, it is the generous badinage between the two key characters that bring this work to life. Velvets of sentiment and pun run through the pages, making Elisabeth’s first person narrative as effective as Daniel’s reticent third person narrative.

At once, hilarious, stimulating, querulous and refreshing, this is Smith’s frolicking side at play, without losing the sight of her trademark percipience. Winter, I await.

[Note: Thanks to Netgalley, Ali Smith and Penguin Books (UK) for providing me an ARC.]

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I liked How To Be Both enough to give this one a go, and I found it very involving and perceptive.

It is hard to say exactly what Autumn is about. Daniel, aged over 100, is lying largely asleep in a care-home bed in 2016. 32-year-old Elisabeth sits by his bed reading; she was Daniel's neighbour when she was about 10 and formed a strong relationship with him as he imparted his humanity and insight to her. The book consists of episodes from the past of both characters (and later of Pauline Boty, a founder of the pop-art movement) plus reflections on post Referendum Britain. It sounds pretty ghastly, but I found it full of humane and perceptive observations and exceptionally good writing, and I became very involved with the characters.

Ali Smith reflects on aspects of life in Britain in 2016 and has important things to say about what may matter in life, how communities and individuals relate to each other, women and sexism and plenty more. There are some dream sequences which I found a bit tedious (even though they are far better done than most) but apart from them I found the whole thing really gripping, although I find it hard to say why. It is partly the lovely, distinctive but readable prose, partly the human insight and partly Smith's ability to come up with little gems like, "…I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn't thinking about you, I thought about you." I love that, and plenty else in the book – like Daniel's invariable greeting "Hello. What are you reading?" or how beautifully touching the lyrics of a song become because we have had a glimpse of what is behind them.

I'm sure this won't be for everyone, but I'd recommend giving it a try even if you're dubious about it. If you do find it's for you, it will be a very rewarding, thoughtful and touching read.

Ali Smith's lyrical writing is rewarding throughout Autumn. Whether in the breathtaking and semi-mythic passages that detail the mind between life and death, or in the sharp funny sad Post Office scenes, Smith's writing demands attention. I read this quickly, as it is short work divided into a series of vignettes. The shorter stories fold onto each other and build into several love stories, which the reader and the lover recognise at the same time.
The book is about now, about England, about immigrants, about love and family. Highly recommend and I will be reading the next book Smith writes.