A richly inventive new collection of stories from Ali Smith, author of How to be both, winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize and the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Why are books so very powerful?
What do the books we’ve read over our lives – our own personal libraries – make of us?
What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?
The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.
Public libraries are places of joy, freedom, community and discovery – and right now they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.
Reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/03/ali-smith-public-library-and-other-stories-review
 | Ali SmithAli Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is a writer of novels, short stories, plays, and criticism Her latest novel, HOW TO BE BOTH, was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize and won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Her story collection, PUBLIC LIBRARY AND OTHER STORIES, was published last November, and her new novel AUTUMN will be published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton in October 2016. |
