COMPANION PIECE by Ali Smith - Spotlight

 


Award-winning author @AliSmith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish provocative novel, #COMPANIONPIECE (VintageBooks) that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague.

A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.
 
A day spent locked in a room by border officials without any explanation as to why. A riddle that seemingly has no answer: curlew or curfew, you choose. A phone call from a college friend who hasn't been in touch in years.  And all of it is somehow inextricably linked to the life of a young blacksmith hounded from her trade and branded a vagrant nearly 500 years ago.

Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to  Ali Smith's gorgeous canon.


Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born August 1962 in Inverness) is a Scottish writer.

She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with CFS/ME. Following this she became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. Openly gay, she lives in Cambridge with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.

In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

In 2009, she donated the short story Last (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Fire' collection.

Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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