Companion piece
The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of How to be both
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
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
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith's expansive and tantalizing spin-off of her Seasonal Quartet series blends stories of mythology, English history, and personal trauma. While artist Sandy Gray waits for news about her elderly father who's recovering in the hospital after an unspecified life-threatening episode, she gets a call from Martina Inglis Pelf, an assistant to an art curator and former university acquaintance of Sandy's. Pelf tells a story about a lengthy airport customs detainment upon returning with a Boothby lock and key artifact belonging to a 16th-century chest and accidentally presenting the wrong passport. Pelf thinks Sandy can decipher the meaning behind a voice in the holding room that whispered "curlew or curfew." Therein lies Smith's intricate, interlocking narratives, which involve the story of three-headed beast Cerberus, whom Sandy imagines talking with brutish police in the register of "English music-hall comedy" ("'Ello 'Ello 'Ello. Wot's all this then?"); Pelf's peculiar twin daughters; and a teenaged female blacksmith during the 13th-century black plague with mythic connections to Vulcan and Pandora and haunting parallels to the Boothby apparatus and the Covid-19 pandemic. As ever, Smith's flawless stream-of-conscious narration is at once accessible and transforming, and with it she manages to contain eye-blinking hallucinatory images, such as a shattered clock that reconstitutes itself. This is a captivating Rubik's cube of fiction.
