Where to start with Ali Smith

British novelist, born 1962. Won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015 and the Costa Novel Award in 2005 and 2014.

Best Ali Smith book to start with: How to Be Both (2014), on 5 of the 18 lists it could have made.

How to Be Both is where most readers meet Ali Smith. It won the Costa Novel Award in 2014 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2015, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014. It has two halves, one set in Renaissance Italy and one in modern Britain, and some printings put them in a different order, so you may read either first.

Autumn is the easier start if you want something gentler. It was shortlisted for the Booker in 2017, and it follows a young woman and her elderly neighbour in the strange mood of Britain after the 2016 referendum. Winter, shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2018, is the next in the same series of seasonal books, so read Autumn first.

The Accidental, which won the Costa in 2005, is about a family on holiday and the stranger who joins them. Hotel World, shortlisted for the Booker and the Women’s Prize in 2001, is told in five voices linked by a death in a hotel. There but for the begins when a guest at a dinner party locks himself in a bedroom and will not come out.