Public Library and Other Stories

This is a richly inventive new collection of stories from Ali Smith, author of How to be both, winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize and the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we’ve read over our lives – our own personal libraries – make of us? What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection 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 right now they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.

Reviews of Public Library and Other Stories

Smith is dazzling in her daring. Sheer inventive power Observer Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation Daily Express In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone Scotsman Smith's world is incredibly generous – it's a place where all sorts of stories and human connections are possible Metro