Winter (Longlisted For The Orwell Prize 2018)

Description:

A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.

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 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.

Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now.

Review: Cleverly constructed and elegantly written. It's both an engaging human story and a place for wider topical observations. Bring on Spring * Evening Standard *
If Ali Smith's four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker mid-winter than people often fear * Financial Times *
Smith is a specialist by now in using a quizzical, feather-light prose style to interrogate the heaviest of material...throughout Winter, grief and pain are transfigured, sometimes lastingly, by luminous moments of humour, insight and connection... Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen * Telegraph *
A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised...Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain... Luminously beautiful * Observer *
A sparkler...tune in to Spring and Summer to see if art can save the day * Spectator *
Graceful... That trademark mischievous wit and wordplay, a joyful reminder of the most basic, elemental delights of reading ... Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope * Independent *
A capacious, generous shapeshifter of a novel taking in Greenham Common and Barbara Hepworth, Shakespeare and global migration, it juxtaposes art with nature and protest with apathy, finding surprising alliances in a family riven by feuds. It's a book with Christmas at its heart, in all its familiarity and estrangement: about time, and out of time, like the festival itself * The Guardian *

Author Biography: Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women's Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.