BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall th...

**MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take."Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books**One of the New York Times’s100 Best Books of the 21st Century...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From a literary master, a novel of ghosts and history and family legacy, of the unexpected acts of care that shine light into our dark.Ghosts don't exist.They don't. End of.Story, however.It is haunting.Everything tells it.It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themsel...

'Playful, bold, tender . . . in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day' *GuardianGhosts don't exist.*They don't. End of.Story, however.It is haunting.Everything tells it.It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.Is it imaginary? Is it real?Th...

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • The first novel in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love—and stories themselves.Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984—look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons r...

Brought to you by Penguin.Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a ch...

There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland.Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions.By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations abo...

**A richly inventive collection of stories about our enduring love of books from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet'Smith is dazzling in her daring. Sheer inventive power' Observer**Why are books so powerful?What do the books we read make of us?And what does the vanishing of public libraries say about us?These stories are...

A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us...

From the Man Booker Prize finalist: 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.Grounded in current politics, in the work of artists Pauline Boty,...

**WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2026SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BOWKER VOLCANO PRIZE 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2024‘Miraculous . . . tender, hilarious and ultimately uplifting. A ray of hope’ Paul Murray, Irish Times**Once upon a time, not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint round the outside of their house . . .So begins the freewheeling and urgent new novel from Ali Smith – the sto...

Ali Smith's "beautifully written, precise, poetic" (The Observer) debut that follows the briefly intertwined lives of two young womenWhen we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma-a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by....