Companion Piece

by Ali Smith

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet

One 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 Statesman

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels, Audiobook, British Literature, 21st Century

230 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2022

About the author

Ali Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.