There But For The

Author: Ali Smith

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $26.95 AUD
  • : 9780241144541
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
  • : Hamish Hamilton Ltd
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  • : January 2011
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  • : 26.95
  • : June 2011
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Ali Smith
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  • : Paperback
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  • : very good
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  • : 356
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Barcode 9780241144541
9780241144541

Description

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, cliche 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.

Author description

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.