A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Kirkus • A BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: The New York Times, TIME, Esquire, LitHub, Philadelphia Inquirer
“It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith. No one else, I would argue, captures our ongoing contemporary nightmare in a manner that is both expansively imaginative and the perfect mirror of its abrupt absurdity. . . . A novel both enigmatic and inviting, begging to be read and reread. . . . A clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, Los Angeles Times
“Companion Piece is a novel for people who love language. . . . Coming on the heels of Smith’s seasonal quartet, which somehow kept up with the blitzkrieg of current events, Companion Piece takes place in our pandemic-inflected world, an all-too-familiar territory that Smith characteristically renders wonderfully strange. This she does, in part, by blending Sandy’s 21st-century story with another set in the plague-haunted England of the late Middle Ages.”
—Ellen Atkins, The Washington Post
“Superb. . . . Martina was held and questioned while transporting the centuries-old Boothby Lock for the museum where she works. “It’s really beautiful,” Martina tells Sandy. “It’s really cunning too. You could never tell by looking at it that it’s even a lock, or that it has any mechanism at all inside it, never mind find how or where the key goes into it to open it.” Which is, of course, a fine description of this novel, itself a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it. . . . [A] remarkable novel.”
—Mohsin Hamid, The New York Times Book Review
“In her latest novel, wordsmith nonpareil Ali Smith once again shows herself to be a master of forging inventive connections. Companion Piece helps us see our world in a different light by finding points of contact between two plagues and two female artists, five centuries apart. . . . Ever intent on expanding our understanding of others and the world we share, Smith's work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful — and never irrelevant. But timely though her work may be, Smith is not one to eschew the long view: History matters to her, and so do artists and artisans from the past — almost as much as words. . . . One of Smith's great gifts as a writer is verbal playfulness — a joy of lex — even in dark times. . . . Smith, on fire, welds so many elements into this short novel . . . that the result is as intricate as that artisanal lock.”
—Heller McAlpin, NPR
"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
“Smith, whose recent Seasonal Quartet novels took on real-life events like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the wildfires in Australia, has now written a pandemic-era story. 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
"Companion Piece [is] a distinct but worthy addition full of jokes, puns, and parables to make sense of the modern pandemic age.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Smith’s sensational twelfth novel, like the eleven before it, defies easy categorization. The chaser to her extraordinary Seasonal Quartet centers on Sandy Gray, here a painter struggling to endure Covid-19 lockdown in England. . . . Like Smith’s other novels, Companion Piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements.”
—Esquire
“Companion Piece is shapely, but not conclusive. It doesn’t feel like a coda to the Four Seasons tetralogy, rather an addition to a book sequence for all seasons, with no end in sight. Smith could carry on adding to the writerly collage she is creating through many more volumes. I hope she does.”
—Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Guardian
“[A] dialogue-driven, deeply imagined, hilarious, and affecting tale of unexpected companionship during a plague . . . Smith follows her award-winning Seasonal Quartet with a bristling yet tender, richly layered, brilliant, and dynamic novel of connections forged and love affirmed.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Linguistic fireworks? Check. Ingenious structure? Check. Moral indignation? Check . . . A novel set on the edge of the moment . . . It wouldn’t be an Ali Smith novel without linguistic fireworks; increasingly nor would it be one without a sense of moral indignation. Companion Piece is, to use the Smith cliché lexicon, “characteristically unclassifiable”, “predictably unpredictable” and “as freewheeling as a rollercoaster.” She is in grave peril of becoming a national treasure.”
—The Scotsman
“Companion Piece is a fitting title for Ali Smith’s 12th novel, her first after the extraordinary Seasonal Quartet. It’s a book that springs from the same source as its predecessors, written and published swiftly, it is about as real-time as novels get . . . It feels as if Smith so enjoyed the breakneck speed of writing her quartet that she has produced this: a companion piece . . . The two parts of the novel reflect upon and enlarge each other, collapsing time and illustrating the way that problems . . . are rooted deeply in our collective histories . . . Smith constructs her novels, with scenes and stories accreting over time, generating a vast but insidious power . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious.”
—Alex Preston, The Guardian
“Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet of novels is one of the most interesting enterprises in recent fiction . . . They are quizzical, often very funny, and their apparently relaxed and voluble style cunningly disguises just what a high-wire act this is. We want these novels to go on talking, and not every writer achieves that . . . It’s all beautifully human, and the opposite of polemic. It understands the other point of view, as novels always have, and in the end shrugs off any idea that it might know best . . . A glorious, entertaining and expert portrayal of the world we live in, seen by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences.”
—The Telegraph (UK)
“Smith’s serious intentions never dim her playful ingenuity. . . . Fusing polemic, poetry and disquisitions on nature and the arts, Smith creates a framework with which to dissect some of the most critical themes of our times . . . Smith is a celebrator of the paradox, of the cyclical nature of death and birth, endings and beginnings . . . Yet the implicit and explicit messages Smith is delivering through Companion Piece, as with the Seasonal Quartet, are that interconnectedness and community can triumph over disaffection and disconnection. Those are themes that do not date; a reminder in perilous times of the need for Smith’s wise, humane and generous voice—and the angry consolation her work provides.”
—Financial Times (UK)
"Intricate . . . Expansive and tantalizing . . . 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.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[T]his touching entertainment . . . is Smith's pandemic land, where myth and reality converse, where lockdown might evoke medieval artisanry, and where wordplay is more than playful. The Scottish author’s 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands . . . With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress. A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.“
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ 05/02/2022
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. (May)
06/03/2022
Two-time Man Booker short-listed Smith follows up her distinctive "Seasonal Quartet" with a timely new offering. Out of the blue, Sandy Gray receives a phone call from Martina Pelf, an old college acquaintance. They had previously met only once, years earlier, when Martina sought Sandy's help with a difficult poetry assignment. Now an assistant museum curator, Martina recently flew home with a medieval artifact known as the Boothby Lock. Upon arrival, she was detained without explanation for many hours in a locked room, where she heard a disembodied voice say, "Curlew or curfew. You choose." Already stressed out over pandemic restrictions, her father's hospitalization, and the care of his dog, Sandy offers what little assistance she can. This brief interaction leads the Pelf daughters to barge their way into Sandy's home in search of the missing Martina. Did any of this actually happen or might it all have been a COVID hallucination? VERDICT As she demonstrated so strikingly in her seasonal quartet, Smith keeps her finger on the pulse of our chaotic times. It's no surprise that she would take on the current pandemic (with a nod to an earlier one) and handle it, as usual, with aplomb.—Barbara Love
There’s so much going on in this compact audiobook that it hardly seems possible all the details could dovetail so well. Natalie Simpson is a deft narrator no matter where or when a scene is taking place. Her beautifully accented voice has a musical quality that suits Smith's lyrical prose. One minute Simpson is bringing the novel's beauty poetically to life through her savoring of the language, and the next minute she is capturing the subtle wit of its human comedy and tragedy. Grounded in the story of artist Sandy's trials during Covid restrictions, the narrative does not follow a traditional arc. The audio format suits the structure, but it still may not be to everyone's taste. The patient, receptive listener will embrace this title. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
There’s so much going on in this compact audiobook that it hardly seems possible all the details could dovetail so well. Natalie Simpson is a deft narrator no matter where or when a scene is taking place. Her beautifully accented voice has a musical quality that suits Smith's lyrical prose. One minute Simpson is bringing the novel's beauty poetically to life through her savoring of the language, and the next minute she is capturing the subtle wit of its human comedy and tragedy. Grounded in the story of artist Sandy's trials during Covid restrictions, the narrative does not follow a traditional arc. The audio format suits the structure, but it still may not be to everyone's taste. The patient, receptive listener will embrace this title. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-03-16
An artist in England copes with old and new strangers in a time of plague in this touching entertainment.
Painter Sandy Gray is at home in England in 2021 imagining Cerberus talking to a British policeman when she gets a call from someone she barely knew at college some 30 years earlier. Martina Pelf, who remembers Sandy as being good at explaining things, tells her about getting stopped at border control on her return from a trip to collect a 16th-century lock for the museum where she works. While being held in an interview room, Martina hears a disembodied voice ask a strange sort-of question: “curlew or curfew.” This is Smith's pandemic land, where myth and reality converse, where lockdown might evoke medieval artisanry, and where wordplay is more than playful. The Scottish author’s 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands. The main one concerns the fallout from the unexpected phone call, which sends Sandy, who narrates the novel, back to a moment at university when she explained an e.e. cummings poem for Martina and forward to a point when, in one long hilarious scene, the Pelf family invades Sandy’s home, breaking all the pandemic rules. She recalls the story of an aunt’s illness in the 1930s and often thinks of her father, who is currently in the hospital with an ailment that won’t be revealed until the penultimate page. The curlew and the curfew will resurface when a homeless teenager breaks into Sandy’s house and then, in a 40-page fable, is pre-incarnated as a gifted teen blacksmith, perhaps the artisan behind the aforementioned lock. With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress.
A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.