The First Person and Other Stories

Ali Smith

From Shelf: Wish list

Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, the author explores the ways and whys of storytelling.

A form-bending and endlessly inventive collection of short stories - from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form' Independent A middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. An innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, we see a narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and a nymph. Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones in equal measure. One-of-a-kind Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.*****'Hurrah for Ali Smith . . . A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is' The Times'Gleefully turns the short story inside-out . . . Smith is such a dazzling author that finishing one of her books is always bittersweet' Scotland on Sunday