"This is the most political book thus far in this earthy and humane series. Its heart is worn far out on its sleeve. It beats arrhythmically somewhere down near the knuckles....Smith's vision isn't fundamentally pessimistic, however. There's too much squirming life in her fiction, slashes of cleansing light for those who seek it." - New York Times "Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices."-- The Guardian From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and Winter , as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to be both , comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet 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 tells 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.