Start with How to Be Both. It is self-contained, it is her best-made book, and it teaches you in two hundred pages how to read everything else she has written — the puns that turn into arguments, the dead who talk, the refusal to keep two time periods apart.
The obvious alternative is to open Autumn and start the Seasonal Quartet immediately. That is a mistake for a first-time reader, because the quartet assumes a tolerance for digression and collage that Smith has spent her whole career building, and Autumn spends its opening pages on a dream sequence that has sunk plenty of people who would have loved the book from chapter three onwards. Read How to Be Both first and the quartet stops looking like chaos.
How to Be Both, and the coin toss
How to Be Both is two halves: a fifteenth-century fresco painter and a grieving twenty-first-century teenager. Copies were printed in two different orders, so which half you read first depends on which copy you happen to buy. Do not hunt for a particular version. Read the one in your hands, in the order it is bound, because the whole point is that either sequence produces a complete and different book. Compare notes with someone who got the other one.
The Seasonal Quartet, in published order
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer. Published order is the only sensible order, and unlike most quartets this one has a hard reason: the books were written and published fast, deliberately, so that each could absorb the news of the months it was written in. Read out of sequence and the accumulating present tense — the referendum, the hostile environment, the detention centres, then the pandemic — arrives scrambled.
They are only loosely linked. Characters and objects recur, a Pauline Boty painting here, a returning minor figure there, and Summer pulls threads from all three predecessors together. But each novel stands alone, which is why plenty of readers have read one and stopped without feeling cheated.
An honest warning about the middle. Most readers rate Autumn and Summer highest and find Winter and Spring the loose ones — Winter leans hard on a Dickens structure that does not entirely hold, and Spring contains the quartet's angriest and least controlled writing about immigration detention. Whether that is a flaw or the point depends on what you want from a novel written to a deadline about events still happening. Nobody should be surprised to find these two books unevenly made; Smith was not aiming at polish.
There is a fifth book, Companion Piece, published after the quartet and set in the same world. It is not in our catalogue and it is not required — the quartet closes properly without it.
The earlier novels
Hotel world and The Accidental are where to go if the quartet works for you. Hotel world is told partly by a dead chambermaid and is the most formally aggressive thing she has written. The Accidental drops a stranger into a middle-class family's summer holiday and lets her dismantle it; it is the funniest of her novels and the most conventionally plotted, which makes it the easiest recommendation after How to Be Both. There but for the is the one with the man who locks himself in a spare room during a dinner party and refuses to come out — an excellent joke sustained for a whole book, and the one where the wordplay is thickest.
Where to stop
How to Be Both plus Autumn is enough to know whether Smith is a writer for you. If she is, read the rest of the quartet and then The Accidental. If the wordplay grates — and for some readers it does, consistently, from the first page to the last — no later book will fix that, because it is not a mannerism she grew out of. It is the method.
More contemporary fiction paths are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Ali Smith Reading Order: How to Read the Seasonal Quartet.
