Companion Piece
ALI SMITH
(Hamish Hamilton, 240 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Published in 2020, Summer concluded Ali Smith’s seasons tetralogy, but ­evidently she has not quite been able to relinquish this new writing method of fast composition and topical subject matter. Companion Piece has the same livery and design as the four previous novels, and features another attractive David Hockney image for the cover. Fiftysomething bisexual artist Sandy Gray, like the author fascinated by wordplay, is stuck in the Covid and career doldrums. Even puns – “mulch of a mulchness” – don’t give the pleasure they once did. It will be many pages before Sandy’s gender is confirmed, by which time it scarcely seems to matter. The first section is gnomically headed: “You choose.”