Autumn is the first of a series of four Seasonal books that Ali Smith has written in response to our post-Brexit world. I don’t know about you, but I find Autumn the most difficult season of the year to face. Nature might be putting on a dazzling show in reds and gold, but all the beauty signals the dying of the year and the unavoidable approach of Wintry bleakness. I don’t fear Winter – I actually enjoy it when it arrives, but it’s the transition that feels so destabilising. It is this state of flux which Smith explores in Autumn, the uncertainty of our future now we’ve shifted direction and are heading who knows where?

At the beginning of the novel, centenarian Daniel dreams of the seashore from his hospital bed. He finds himself covered in leaves, transported to an Eden-like forest, an in-between place. This is a novel…