Review: Autumn by Ali Smith

Autumn left me marvelling at its brilliance and wondering how on earth this shit got published. It's the story of a little girl and her friendship with an elderly neighbour, it's a story of a grown up woman visiting a dying man in a nursing home, it's the story of how one man escaped the holocaust and lived a long life in England, it's the story a nation in political turmoil, and it's something of a modern tribute to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. In other words, this book is everything and nothing, it's brilliant and it's stupid, it's good enough to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize but, evidently, it was not good enough to win. 

And that's really it. Everything and nothing. Yet strangely addictive.

This may well be a book that needs to be read two or even three times to be appreciated.

Recommended. 

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