Companion Piece

Following her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, award-winning author Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel grounded both in the contemporary era and in the uncannily familiar era of the Black Plague. This is a vital celebration of companionship in all its timeless and present, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms.

Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?
 
What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?
 
Companion Piece stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith’s groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times.

“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. Smith's 11th novel is most similar to her award-winning literary diptych, How To Be Both (2014). . . . This time around, she features a middle-aged painter who layers the words of poems onto canvases (akin to the way Smith builds layers of meaning in her novels), and a gifted 16th century blacksmith and metalworker who is brutalized for attempting to ply her trade as a girl. Companion Piece is also in line with Smith's recent Seasonal Quartet, written in real time, incorporating current events such as Covid lockdowns, and sharing this engaged and engaging author's overarching concerns with grief, human warmth, cruelty, language, and art. 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. Companion Piece is, among other things, a passionate paean to books, which Smith's narrator, Sandy Gray, insists are important not just because they're pleasurable, but "because they're one of the ways we can imagine ourselves otherwise." . . . One of Smith's great gifts as a writer is verbal playfulness—a joy of lex—even in dark times. . . . By exploring binaries such as imagination versus reality, surface versus depth, real versus fake, and stories versus lies—with their often blurred boundaries—Companion Piece challenges readers to embrace the indeterminate. Smith, on fire, welds so many elements into this short novel—including Sandy's dreams and childhood memories and the terrible ordeals of a talented, steely 16th century waif—that the result is as intricate as that artisanal lock.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

“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

“[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)
 
“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)

“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)

“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
 
“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)

“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, The Best Spring Books of 2022