The Lowdown – Spring

Posted on the 03 May 2020 by Booksocial

So May has arrived and we are still in lockdown. To counter this we have chosen for our Book of the Month a book whose name alone conjures up the greenest, newest outdoor scene you can imagine – Spring by Ali Smith.

Volume Three

Spring is actually volume 3 in Smith’s Seasons Quartet. Autumn and Winter were published in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Summer is pencilled in for later this year. The books are standalone works of fiction although they do interconnect at various points. Spring is a very modern book covering current affairs such as Brexit and climate change amongst a world lost souls and divides. We haven’t read the first two books, we don’t know if that matters, but we are going in anyway and would love you to join us.

Spring – the blurb

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.

Join Us…

We will be sharing our Big Review of Spring on 29 May. A series of Book Club questions will also be around for you to answer on 28th. Don’t wait until then though, we would love to know your marks out of ten as soon as you have read it. So grab your copy and read along with us.