From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020 What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit,  the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal. “Is it possible, in this vertiginous moment, for a novel to be both timely and deep? Timeliness, these days, requires a quick trigger finger. . . . By the time a book appears, the conversation has moved on. . . . But the Scottish marvel Ali Smith breaks rules better than anyone. . . . She’s given us, with Spring , the third in a planned quartet named for the seasons, an addition to a work-in-progress both as raw as this morning’s Twitter rant and as lasting and important as—and I say this neither lightly nor randomly— Ulysses . . . . These novels, in straddling immediacy and permanence, the personal as well as the scope of a world tilting toward disaster, are the ones we might well be looking back on years from now as the defining, if baffling, literature of an indefinable and baffling era. And the shape the telling takes is, if not salvation, brilliance itself.” —Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review   “There is the rageful noise of news and politics, and then there is the slower pace and synthesizing power of fiction. Smith’s seasonal quartet of novels—this is the third of four volumes—bridges that distance by speeding up the work without sacrificing the author’s brilliant characterization and language.  Spring  is her most political volume, focusing in part on the work of a British immigration officer and a tween with the magical power of turning people compassionate—something Brexiting Britain needs as much of as we do.” —Boris Kachka, Vulture “Ali Smith has produced another pulsating, often enigmatic, work that feels of a piece, but in many ways is richer than its predecessors. Employing her characteristic playful, allusive prose, she manages to again tilt our everyday world at an angle that allows us to see it with fresh eyes . . . Smith concludes with a tribute to April, the month that ‘teaches us everything,’ when one can ‘[p]ass any flowering bush or tree and you can’t not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time’s factory.’ Vibrating with energy, passion and wit, Spring possesses that same buzz, a quality that propels this singular quartet into its final season.” —Harvey Freedenberg, Bookreporter “ Spring moves easily between the political and the aesthetic, the timely and the timeless . . . It features three major characters: Richard Lease, an aging film director who’s just lost his closest friend . . . Brit Hall, a young, smart woman miserably stuck working as a guard at a prison-like detention center for immigrants to the UK; and Florence, a mysterious, fairy-like schoolgirl who seems straight out of a Shakespearean romance . . . Richard has come to his friend to discuss a new project: a film about the almost-but-not-quite meeting of two great modernist writers, Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke, at a Swiss resort in 1922. Richard’s description of Mansfield fits Smith, too: ‘brilliant, tricksy, arch, flirty, charming, and full of an unfathomable energy.’ . . . Structurally playful and stylistically frisky . . . [A] splendid new novel.” —Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe “Open  Spring , and words erupt off the page, a wide-ranging rant of demands and wants, as if the tantrum of our political moment has found a voice. But then! Another voice rises, all-powerful Mother Earth promising, in spite of humanity’s puny mewling and intransigence, to once more bring green spring out of the deadly mess we’ve made. “This is Ali Smith, the crazy-brilliant Scottish writer, so it’s a good bet there’s some method in the madness, even if it takes a while to emerge. And sure enough, we’re soon being led along by the fey figure who holds the book together, a 12-year-old girl named Florence whose mysterious story threads through the others we encounter along the way . . .         “ Spring is the third volume in Smith’s seasonal quartet, and once more it immerses us in a world at odds with itself, full of the bluster, squaring off and divisiveness of Brexit and Donald Trump, and teeming with people displaced and fearful and angry. Everything and everyone is on the verge—of chaos, collapse, exile, but also, perennially, spring.            “Chockfull of Smith’s joyous language,