Smith will pull open every drawer with curiosity then wonder what might have fallen behind the furniture In The Definite Article, Smith observes that Regent’s Park could not seem less haunted yet marvels at its populated literary past: Henry James, the Shelleys, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf… a library of names. In Good Voice, Wilfred Owen’s influence counts.

In Say I Won’t Be There, Dusty Springfield is the go-between. In The Ex-Wife, Katherine Mansfield is the powerful third party in a relationship. It is an unreciprocated intimacy but never, in Smith’s hands, a lifeless one. Reading is borrowing without guilt (in one story, Smith goes further saying: “We’re all in receipt of stolen goods”). What does it mean to know a writer through their books? One may know a writer better than a friend. Her stories illustrate, too, that our lives are defined by what we borrow. The passion with which Smith resists this decline is moving – she has an unswerving sense that we are what we read. Over the last seven years, more than a thousand have gone. In a talk at last summer’s Edinburgh book festival, Smith explained that while editing this book, she asked friends what libraries meant to them (their eloquent answers bookmark her stories) and that during that short time – a couple of months – 23 libraries closed.

You can travel anywhere on an Ali Smith library ticket. It is also a collection of stories characterised by an imaginative freedom underpinned by her reading. Smith’s book that, in inferior hands, could have been a worthy bore, is a brilliant, comprehensive, unpredictable defence of public libraries. As libraries and bookshops close, that keenest of pleasures – browsing, roaming, happening on whatever it was you did not know you were lacking – is in jeopardy, a joy the internet cannot replicate.

W hen you are in a library, you might not know what book you are looking for but the chances are that, even if you don’t, you will find it.

Public library and other stories