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 roll round, as ever. A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Autumn is wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories.

Overall, this was a winner with NUBClub. There were some naysayers on this book, who mostly noted that not much happened and the plot was thin, and no one argued with that. It is a small plot. But the majority who loved the book saw that as a strength -- Nick noted that the book was basically a vignette of the strange, deep friendship between a young woman and a much older, dying man. We marveled at how strongly the relationship was relayed in the simple observations Elisabeth makes in her reflections of her childhood and her art-critic view of the world in which she lives, and the writing of the bond between Elisabeth and Daniel and how they met was so strong in places it moved several of us to tears. At the same time, we marveled at how well Smith integrated observations about political conflict and local protest, here about land use in a small town but with clear echoes of Brexit concerns. There were certainly some confusing sections, most notably Daniel's illness-induced dreams, but even those sections were beautifully evocative. All and all, Smith's novel paints a stunning singular picture of a relationship and, in its very narrow and focused subject matter, made a gorgeous poem about what true friendship can be and how we come to understand our place in the world.