COMPANION PIECE

By Ali Smith

Synopsis

A story is never an answer. A story is always a question. 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? Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms. Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.

Sample Player

Narrator	Natalie Simpson
Length	5hrs 30mins
Catalogue No.	15634
Publisher	Penguin Audio; 2022

Other audiobooks by Ali Smith

AUTUMN

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about Autumn 2016? The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic. Here comes Autumn.

FREE LOVE

A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.

HOW TO BE BOTH

This is a story about art's versatility. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance. Orange/Baileys Prize. Goldsmiths Prize.

LIFE LINES: THE COMPLETE SERIES 1-5

Ambulance service - is the patient breathing and conscious?' It's a simple question, but call handler Carrie never knows where it might lead. Some calls are life-or-death, others hoaxes - and it's not always easy to tell the difference. The truth is often in the words her callers aren't saying - and it's only by listening hard and reaching out that Carrie can discover what's really going on. Working gruelling 12-hour shifts, the pace is furious, the pressure never lets up, and she finds herself juggling precious resources to try and help everyone in need. Whether it's a man intent on suicide, an acid attack victim, a baby in a bin, or a refugee trapped in a refrigerated lorry, the heart-stopping emergencies keep on coming: and Carrie always keeps her cool. But the relentless stress is taking its toll - and when her judgement is called into question over a patient who later died, she finds her work and her personal life colliding dangerously...

LIKE

There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths.

PUBLIC LIBARY AND OTHER STORIES

These stories are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make. Public libraries are places of joy, freedom, community and discovery - and they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith raises her voice in defence of our public libraries, celebrating their essential place in our culture and history.

SPRING

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. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

SUMMER

In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. Book 4 of Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet.

THERE BUT FOR THE

Imagine you have a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough. Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever.

WINTER

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. It's the season that teaches us survival.