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Seasonal Quartet #1-4
Seasonal Quartet
Seasonal Quartet is a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, which, when taken together, give us something more—all four united by the passing of time, the timing of narrative, and the endless familiarity yet renewal that the cycle of the seasons is.
Contents:
#1 - Autumn
A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.
'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting' The Times
Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.
Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .
#2 - Winter
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter.
The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire.
In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.
It's the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter.
#3 - Spring
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?
Spring. The great connective.
With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.
The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?
Hope springs eternal.
#4 - Summer
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?
Summer.
Contents:
#1 - Autumn
A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.
'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting' The Times
Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.
Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .
#2 - Winter
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter.
The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire.
In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.
It's the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter.
#3 - Spring
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?
Spring. The great connective.
With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.
The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?
Hope springs eternal.
#4 - Summer
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?
Summer.
842 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 11, 2021
22 people are currently reading
926 people want to read
About the author
Ali Smith
151books5,135followersAli 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.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 24, 2022
סקירה נמצאת בכל ספר פרטני
November 15, 2021
I loved this quartet and raced through the whole lot in record time. The structure works perfectly and the language does have an engaging poetic quality that colours and carries the narrative. It is also a very ambitious project to write almost in real time in response to current affairs at such a troubled and eventful time, but the author manages it absolutely deftly giving us beautiful fictional tales and characters carried along by the tide of real-world events. Some people have said that each book can be read on its own. That may well be true but I'm very glad I took on the whole work.
October 21, 2024
Smith’s literary experiment in synchronicity—a quartet of separate, yet interconnected novels named after each season—takes “contemporary literature� to its extremes.
The Seasonal Quartet is an ambitious yet graceful exercise in folding time, each book written and published in just a few months, on the beat of the world’s news, capturing current events in the narrative as close to publication as possible. Each book merges past and present as an attempt to ground our time in its underlying history, because in order to make sense of “now�, you must first understand “then�. Snapshots of the present inevitably become snapshots of the past by the time they are read.
Autumn · ★★★★
Winter · ★★★★
Spring · ★★★�
Summer · ★★�
The Seasonal Quartet is an ambitious yet graceful exercise in folding time, each book written and published in just a few months, on the beat of the world’s news, capturing current events in the narrative as close to publication as possible. Each book merges past and present as an attempt to ground our time in its underlying history, because in order to make sense of “now�, you must first understand “then�. Snapshots of the present inevitably become snapshots of the past by the time they are read.
Autumn · ★★★★
“A minute ago it was June. Now the weather is September. The crops are high, about to be cut, bright, golden. November? Unimaginable. Just a month away.�
Winter · ★★★★
“That’s what winter is: An exercise remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.�
Spring · ★★★�
“The air lifts. It’s the scent of commencement, initiation, threshold. The air lets you know quite ceremonially that something has changed. Primroses. Deep in the ivy throw wide the arms of their leaves. Colour slashes across the everyday. The deep blue of grape hyacinths, the bright yellows in wastelands catching the eyes of the people on trains. Birds visit the leafless trees, but not leafless like in winter; now the branches stiffen, the ends of the twigs glow like slow-burning candles.�
Summer · ★★�
“The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won’t be held to account—because summer won’t be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed. Not even this one she’s in exists. Even though it’s apparently the best summer so far of the century. Not even when she’s quite literally walking down a road as beautiful and archetypal as this through an actual perfect summer afternoon. So we mourn it while we’re in it. Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer. Even while I’m right at the heart of it I just can’t get to the heart of it.�
July 31, 2022
I rated the separate books, but it makes more sense to rate the seasonal quartet. First, what beautiful covers by David Hockney! Same road and trees in the four different seasons.
The series is about many different characters, whose lives are intertwined, sometimes the characters do not know how, but the reader does. It is set against the background of recent events in the UK, with Brexit and the pandemic happening. But it is not about these events, although the characters do comment and have opinions about them. The events serve to paint a bigger picture of what the UK is. And it is clear Ali Smith is not happy. However, the books are also very much about life and art, lots of art.
If I had one negative thing to say is that the books are too full. Like four courses in a meal crammed with too many spices and flavours. I am still digesting this meal.
The series is about many different characters, whose lives are intertwined, sometimes the characters do not know how, but the reader does. It is set against the background of recent events in the UK, with Brexit and the pandemic happening. But it is not about these events, although the characters do comment and have opinions about them. The events serve to paint a bigger picture of what the UK is. And it is clear Ali Smith is not happy. However, the books are also very much about life and art, lots of art.
If I had one negative thing to say is that the books are too full. Like four courses in a meal crammed with too many spices and flavours. I am still digesting this meal.
February 20, 2025
Me lo recomendaron como un libro esperanzador y hermoso sí tiene momentos hermosos como el de la amistad entre Richard y Paddy o la sabiduría de la niña Florence. Sin embargo hay demasiadas historias y una trama que no va tejiendo un hilo. A todas en mi grupo nos costó mucho leerlo. Toca temas fundamentales como el Brexit, el ser extranjero, la migración, el edadismo, la amistad, la justicia social etc...
February 8, 2023
Summer is the marvelous culmination of the Seasonal Quartet with the reappearance of several characters. Sacha's brother Robert is a rebel and a pest, the type to superglue an hourglass to your hand to teach you his theories of time. Once again we see the world through the eyes of clever and blunt children, and it looks pretty bad. Most of their excellent questions about how things are, cannot be answered, but underline how truly askew life is. Even though time is curved and dimensional it can't quite be pinned down to hold the moments we prefer. We meet again the wonderful Daniel Gluck, a Holocaust survivor who has learned to value the simplest things in life (ones that often require a complicated pathway to understand). The characters worry about partisan bickering, propaganda and lies, Greenham Common, detention centers, the inhumanity of public life. Smith is a history nerd who cannot resist excursions to the past where odd words, obscure places and obsolete concepts are collected, analyzed and made part of the rich texture of daily life. We learn about the iconic British letterbox, Einstein, regional Shakespeare performance, swifts and Lorraine Mazzetti the New wave filmmaker. Smith's curiosity is expansive and persuasive, and the reader willingly follows her to many a strange destination.
September 18, 2023
Have wanted to read this series for a while now but could not get into it. I could barely follow what was actually occurring between characters vs what was a dream. Depressed to say that I rarely put books down but this one called for it.
February 20, 2025
I think my fave was winter, but maybe not? all wonderful. summer is scathingly angry in a way I respect. all have that most beautiful writing that we loom to Ali Smith for. somehow both wildly complex and simple all at once.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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