Companion Piece: A Novel

"One of Ali Smith’s great gifts as a writer is verbal playfulness, even in dark times. Fresh off her Seasonal Quartet, Smith finds points of contact between two plagues and two female artists, five centuries apart. The narrator of Companion Piece, a painter who layers the words of poems onto canvases, is in despair over the state of the world and her inability to visit her ailing father in the hospital because of the pandemic. But she finds consolation in surprising places."