Spring: 'A dazzling hymn to hope’ Observer(Seasonal Quartet)

Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the earth, things are growing.

About the Author :
Ali Smith is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, Public library and other stories and Autumn. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Review :
Luminous, generous, hope-filled... The third book in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices... [Ali Smith] is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now Is there a writer so critically acclaimed and universally beloved? ...Autumn, Winter and Spring are stories of the unlikely connections human beings can make and the cost exacted when those connections are broken. They are state of the nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us: the nation is our choices, our fears, our losses... [Ali Smith] is the national novelist we need in 2019 An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons Smith is a masterful storyteller... Spring is political but Smith is more concerned with the human fallout of current affairs then the machinations of elites... Through her account of unlikely friendships, Smith brings human values to the fore. Savour it, because there is just one instalment left Spring weaves a story around the most pressing issues of our time... [A] bubbling, babbling brook of a book...Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to A powerful vision of lost souls in a divided Britain... As Smith's Seasonal Quartet moves towards completion her own role in British fiction looks ever more vital. The final page proclaims spring 'the great connective'. It's not a bad description of Smith herself Beguiling... The eagerly awaited third instalment Infectious in its energy and warmth Just when things were starting to look really bad, along comes the third instalment in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet to lift us out of the gloom... An extraordinary embodiment of the ways in which storytelling connects us... The work of Katherine Mansfield and Rilke, Greek myths and the propulsive lyricism of spring itself, thread together in narratives of loss and rejuvenation The third of her exceptional Seasonal quartet, which riffs back and forth with Autumn and Winter to expound on the importance of hope to move us beyond the darkest of times The most compelling and coherent of the three books... Smith, as always is interested in how a story gets told, and who gets to tell it Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf of our times.