Ali Smith is a formally and thematically exuberant writer who takes obvious pleasure in the art of storytelling, the mutability of language, and slippages in representation and perception. Her novels are typically embedded in the contemporary world, and take account of social and technological developments, as well as political conflicts and crises. They also tend to give equal space to suffering and pleasure: the racking cough of the homeless woman in Hotel World (2001) is as memorable as the ‘woooooooo-hooooooo’ of its tumbling ghost.