Autumn
Ali Smith

Ali Smith’s previous novel, How to be both, won many prizes and deserved all of them. Inadvertently, its readers fell into two camps. Some encountered the spirited recollections of a charismatic, albeit disembodied, fifteenth-century Italian painter followed by the distinctly grounded story of a contemporary teenager mourning the loss of her mother. Thanks to a parallel print run, a similar number, myself included, met the same two narratives, but in reverse order –  except, this being the point, to us they weren’t, and will never seem, transposed. Read either way,  this dazzling novel begged the question whether time is ever linear, speculated how alternative realities might exist simultaneously and played fast and loose with pretty much every fixed notion of identity.