Companion Piece
A Novel
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
"A woman receives an unexpected call from a former classmate asking for help deciphering a puzzling interaction, and from there, Smith spins out a broader story about loneliness, refuge and freedom.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Lyrical and timely…Smith’s novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don’t want to.” —TIME
A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.
A day spent locked in a room by border officials without any explanation as to why. A riddle that seemingly has no answer: curlew or curfew, you choose. A phone call from a college friend who hasn't been in touch in years. And all of it is somehow inextricably linked to the life of a young blacksmith hounded from her trade and branded a vagrant nearly 500 years ago.
Award-winning author Ali Smith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. In the hope that our medieval past may unlock the answers we seek to understand our hazy future, Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to Smith's gorgeous canon.
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.
Customer Reviews
Interesting but Not Grest
Interesting book on the absurdity of human endeavor and behavior at the time of imperialism. Not as exciting as done have noted, a story that’s been told multiple times about the fate of other ships and crews by many authors. This one is different as some lived to tell their tale. Filled with misery and horrendous behavior. Will keep your interest for most of it, but not sure it was a tale worth the telling.