A Stylist Magazine (UK) pick for Best New NonfictionA That Eric Alper pick for My Next ReadsThe Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith's coming-of-age in '90s New York as she commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.As...

A wide-ranging collection of reflective essays, to mark the centenary of the conflict that changed the world.In this collection of essays, ten leading writers from different countries consider the conflicts that have informed their own literary lives. 1914-Goodbye to All That borrows its title from Robert Graves's "bitter leave-taking of England" in which he writes not only of the First World War but the questions it raised: how to live, how to live with each other, and ho...

**WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2026SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BOWKER VOLCANO PRIZE 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2024‘Miraculous . . . tender, hilarious and ultimately uplifting. A ray of hope’ Paul Murray, Irish Times**Once upon a time, not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint round the outside of their house . . .So begins the freewheeling and urgent new novel from Ali Smith – the sto...

Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother's final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother's refusal to 'go gentle' while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir 'shows the power of com...

One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015"An NYRB Classics OriginalThe Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else ...

**MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take."Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books**One of the New York Times’s100 Best Books of the 21st Century...

Born and raised in remote Broken Hill, Trevor Barry left school after year ten to work in the mines. Years later, a single glimpse of Saturn through a colleague's telescope knocked Trevor's world completely off its axis, turning his whole life upside down.With his newfound passion and armed with decades of outback know-how, Trevor set about building an observatory in his backyard using bits and pieces from his shed, a second-hand washing machine motor, rainwater ta...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHA classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, whe...

Born and raised in remote Broken Hill, Trevor Barry left school after year ten to work in the mines. Years later, a single glimpse of Saturn through a colleague's telescope knocked Trevor's world completely off its axis, turning his whole life upside down.With his newfound passion and armed with decades of outback know-how, Trevor set about building an observatory in his backyard using bits and pieces from his shed, a second-hand washing machine motor, rainwater ta...

Among these wonderful, blackly comic tales from the Spanish master of the short story, an office queen falls from her throne, a tartan shirt holds the threads of a man's life, a simple dictation test results in glimpsed mortality, and a case of mistaken identity finally pays off. Taking in love, family, war, food and the unforgettable view of the world from childhood, these rich, charming stories and Fraile's light touch will stay with you long after you have finished reading.

A cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, a treasure trove - we love bookshops because they possess a unique kind of magic. In Browse Henry Hitchings asks fifteen writers from around the world to reveal their favourite bookshops, each conjuring a specific time and place.Ali Smith chronicles the secrets and personal stories hidden within the pages of secondhand books; Alaa Al Aswany tells of the Cairo bookshop where revolutionaries gathered during the 2011 uprisings; Elif S...

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 abo...