Companion Piece

by Ali Smith (Pantheon, $28)

Summarizing the plot of an Ali Smith novel is “not only a challenge but somewhat beside the point,” said Lauren LeBlanc in the Los Angeles Times. Smith’s latest is “a clever, humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment” that improbably begins when middle-aged painter Sandy Gray receives an out-of-the-blue phone call. The caller has been detained in customs while transporting a centuries-old lock, but her plea is about something else instead: deciphering a word riddle. From there, Smith knits together everyday pandemic concerns with flights of consciousness into art, memory, and history, “showing again what exceptional fiction can do that nothing else can.” By the time Sandy is visited by a medieval female blacksmith with a bird on her shoulder, the story is “already pretty strange,” said Ellen Akins in The Washington Post. Though Sandy never does clarify if this vision was real, the blacksmith is real enough to us, and “it’s a measure of Ali Smith’s unfailing wizardry that by the end of this brief novel the mere word ‘hello’ had me near tears.”