There But For The

Ali Smith

ISBN 10: 024114454X / ISBN 13: 9780241144541

Published by Hamish Hamilton, 2011

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 86D3BC5DB19ADA4

Bibliographic Details

• Title: There But For The
• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024114454X
• ISBN 13: 9780241144541
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough.

Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out.

Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever.

This is what Miles does, in a chichi house in the historic borough of Greenwich, in the year 2009-10, in There but for the. Who is Miles, then? And what does it mean, exactly, to live with other people?

Sharply satirical and sharply compassionate, with an eye to the meanings of the smallest of words and the slightest of resonances, There but for the fuses disparate perspectives in a crucially communal expression of identity and explores our very human attempts to navigate between despair and hope, enormity and intimacy, cliché and grace.

Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.

About the Author

Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Her most recent novel, How to be both, was a Man Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa Novel Award, and the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith lives in Cambridge, England.