Ali Smith Books in Order

Smith's debut novel follows Amy, an apparently rootless single mother living in rural Scotland, and Ash, the actress whose notebook reveals the intense student friendship they once shared in Cambridge. Split into two interlocking halves, the book considers memory, queer desire and the tangled ties between Scotland and England.

These early short stories play with form while staying close to everyday encounters, chance meetings and small acts of miscommunication. Relationships shift, identities blur and language itself becomes part of the drama as people try, and often fail, to reach one another.

Free Love and Other Stories gathers twelve tales about desire, missteps and sudden possibility, from a teenage girl's trip to Amsterdam to a woman trapped at an uneasy dinner. The collection introduced Smith's quick, surprising style and her interest in how people find connection in dislocated lives.

Hotel World links five women whose lives touch a bland chain hotel: a teenage chambermaid who dies in a dumbwaiter accident, her grieving sister, a homeless woman, a receptionist and a bored critic. Moving between their voices, the novel explores money, grief, time and what it means to be briefly alive together.

This collection of twelve stories asks how we can ever know the whole story of a life or event. A bookseller watches a customer buy every copy of a single novel, a bookshop clerk studies her customers, and chance, coincidence and time keep reshaping what characters think they understand.

On a summer holiday in Norfolk, a middle class family is unsettled when a stranger called Amber walks into their rented house and simply stays. Seen in turn by each family member, her presence exposes secrets, desires and self deceptions that do not vanish when the holiday ends.

Originally printed as a limited edition, Writ is a single, dazzling short story in which a middle aged woman comes home to find her fourteen year old self in the living room. Their sharp, funny argument about school, poetry and the future becomes a meditation on who we grow into.

Set in Inverness and inspired by an Ovid myth, Girl Meets Boy follows sisters Anthea and Imogen as they work for a bottled water company with dubious ethics. When dreamy Anthea falls for Robin, a genderqueer activist, both sisters are forced to rethink love, work and what counts as a good life.

These twelve stories showcase Smith's love of voice and structure, from a supermarket shopper who finds a foul mouthed baby in her trolley to a woman arguing with her teenage self. The title piece is a tender, talky portrait of a couple working out how to tell the story of their own meeting.

This short retelling of Sophocles' Antigone introduces younger readers to the heroine who defies her uncle's decree to leave her brother unburied. Narrated by a sardonic crow, it turns an ancient tragedy about law, loyalty and conscience into a vivid, accessible story about speaking up.

When Miles Garth excuses himself from a Greenwich dinner party and locks himself in the spare bedroom, refusing to come out, he becomes an unlikely focus for neighbours, strangers and the media. The novel circles around people who once brushed against Miles, using the locked room to ask what we owe to one another.

Artful grows out of a series of lectures and becomes a hybrid of essay and ghost story. A bereaved narrator is visited by the dead lover who had been writing about time, form and art, creating an intimate conversation about how we keep living alongside what we have lost.

Shire brings together four linked pieces that blur fiction, memoir and biography. Moving between gardens, hospitals and remembered classrooms, Smith writes about illness, the Scottish poet Olive Fraser and academic Helena Mennie Shire, tracing how places and mentors shape a writer's sense of home and of art.

This formally playful novel twines together the voice of George, a grieving teenager in contemporary Cambridge, and that of Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. Depending on the edition, their narratives swap places, inviting you to think about gender, looking, art and how stories are always told more than one way.

In this collection, short stories are threaded with real readers' memories of libraries and reading. The pieces explore how books travel with us, how language shapes experience and what is at stake when public libraries are closed or neglected.

Autumn begins Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet with the friendship between Daniel Gluck, a centenarian former songwriter, and Elisabeth Demand, an art loving lecturer who first met him as a child. In the unsettled months after the Brexit vote, their conversations about memory and pop art rub up against queues, fences and fear.

Set around a brittle family Christmas in Cornwall, Winter brings together business focused Sophia, her radical sister Iris, her son Art and a young woman hired to pose as his girlfriend. Old quarrels, protest histories and strange visions crowd the house as the season exposes what they would rather keep hidden.

Drawn from a lecture given for the Muriel Spark centenary, this short book is Ali Smith's spirited tribute to another Scottish novelist. It meditates on Spark's fiction, on truth, power and comedy, and on why storytelling still matters in difficult times.

An aging television director drifting north on a train and a weary detention centre guard both cross paths with Florence, a sharp eyed child who seems to step through every barrier. Their meeting turns a bleak story of immigration control into one that searches for solidarity and hope.

As Britain moves through Brexit, climate anxiety and the first months of COVID, teenage siblings Sacha and Robert clash with each other and their distracted parents. Their story of protest, mischief and care gradually connects with figures from earlier Seasonal novels and with older histories of internment and resistance.

During lockdown, a solitary writer is detained without explanation by border officials, then contacted by an old acquaintance with a strange riddle that will not leave her alone. The mystery links her father's illness, a fugitive teenager and a long ago girl blacksmith.

In a tightly controlled near future, siblings Briar and Rose are labeled "unverifiable" by the authorities and risk being removed to a re education centre. When their mother disappears, they set out with a grey horse they name Gliff, testing the painted boundaries of their world and the systems that try to fix who they are.