The First Person and Other Stories

A form-bending and endlessly inventive collection of short stories - from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women''s Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet

''A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form'' Independent

A middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. An innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, we see a narrator, ''Ali'', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and a nymph.

Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones in equal measure. One-of-a-kind Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

*****

''Hurrah for Ali Smith . . . A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is'' The Times

''Gleefully turns the short story inside-out . . . Smith is such a dazzling author that finishing one of her books is always bittersweet'' Scotland on Sunday