The Seasons: [Autumn; Winter; Spring; Summer] and Companion Piece

SMITH, Ali

The Seasons: [Autumn; Winter; Spring; Summer] and Companion Piece

London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016-2022

8vos., 5 vols; teal, ochre, rust, grey and bright purple cloth, respectively; lettered in silver, gilt and orange to spines and upper boards; coloured endpapers; with wraparound wrapper bands illustrated by David Hockney; essentially fine copies all. 

First editions, first printings, complete with the wraparounds. All five volumes signed by the author in a variety of different coloured inks beneath her name to titles. A series of newspaper clippings have also been loosely inserted, including reviews of Summer in the Sunday Times, Autumn in the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph, and Winter in the Daily Telegraph. 

Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1962. Completing an English Literature and Language degree at the University of Aberdeen, she went on to study American and Irish modernism at Newnham College, Cambridge, but instead began to write plays and as such did not complete the course. Several of her plays were staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and she then began to write short stories, with Free Love and other Stories released in 1995. Veering into journalism,she subsequently contributed articles for The Guardian, The Scotsman, New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement.

Smith began her collection of seasonal novels in 2016 with Autumn, a work which concentrated on the ‘state of the nation’ rapidly following the referendum. Widely regarded at the time as the first work to deal predominantly with the subject of Brexit, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. It was quickly followed by Winter the following year, which focuses on a family reunion at Christmas; Spring in 2019, which concentrates on themes of immigration and human nature; and Summer in 2020, which was strongly influenced by the pandemic. 

“She plays with folklore, fairytale, Shakespearean doublings and slippages and intricate, interdependent fables that ultimately, like the parts of a lock mechanism, click and open” one reviewer writes, “Smith’s mind is a brilliant conundrum: wildly curious but focused, eclectic and academic.”

The novels which arguably best depicted the tumultuous years of Brexit and Covid combined, appearing here together signed.