Winter : Seasonal Quartet

Winter : Seasonal Quartet
ISBN: 9780241207031
Publication Date: 13 November 2017

From the peerless author of Autumn and How to be both - the second novel in the Seasonal quartet.

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter.

The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire.

In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.

It's the season that teaches us survival.

Here comes Winter.

Review by Ben Hunter

Just as with the 2016 Man Booker shortlisted Autumn, Ali Smith's Winter is a playful, yet moving novel set deep in the moral/political quagmire of post-referendum Britain.

Sophia Cleves, a businesswoman exhausted by age and isolation is Smith's homage to Scrooge. Like Scrooge, Sophia is being paid visit by a ghost in many forms and is ushered, along with readers, through events past and present. We learn of her estrangement from her sister Iris, an activist newly returned from the European refugee crisis, and of young Art (short for Arthur) with his Art In Nature blog of largely false observations of a world that doesn't really exist. This family sit side by side with one another but observe their world completely differently, working as a kind of model for a fractured, distressed nation.

Thrust in their midst is Lux, a Croatian girl collected f...