From Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith, Winter is the second novel in her Seasonal Quartet. This much-anticipated follow-up to Autumn is one of the Best Books of the Year from the New York Public Library. “A stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history.” —Time Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art’s mother is seeing things. … old song goes. And now Art’s mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art’s seeing things himself.
When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone?
Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.
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Absolutely one of the best books I’ve ever read. If you love gorgeous prose, flawed characters, and sharp observation of human nature, this is the book for you.
An exploration of nature in every sense: human nature, the nature of families, the nature of politics, the nature of love. Ali Smith’s writing never fails to remind the reader of the extraordinary, terrifying, unpredictable aspects of life, both past and present. I’m looking forward to reading Autumn and Spring.
I couldn’t get into this book. I gave up after three chapters. I couldn’t follow her plot
Found this book hard to get into. Not my style at all
It took me a while to get into the swing of this book but I absolutely loved it. Very much capturing the UK at this point in time and I found myself feeling deeply for the characters.
A family story intertwined with the story of our era. Odd, in Ali Smith’s wonderful way, and/but very moving in the end.
Ali Smith has a way of drawing you into her world. I always find myself lost in her novels and, when I’ve finished them, at a loss as to how to summarize them. This review was stretching out way too long, so I’m starting again, paring away the details that you need to discover for yourself.
Winter is both a family drama and a commentary on the changing climate–both the physical climate and the sociopolitical one. The family: three estranged people and a lovable impostor. The commentary: our world, what it is doing to humanity, and what humanity is doing to it. One of Smith’s targets is technology and the way it removes us from real relationships, responsibility, and personal authenticity. The egotism and isolation it creates feeds into the populist movements that brought us Brexit and Donald Trump, both of which come under Smith’s verbal attack. There’s a moment when Art, one of the main characters, reads about a crowdfunding effort to raise money to buy a boat that will repel Italian boats trying to rescue refugees. It’s hard not to see in that the support in some American quarters for building a wall on the Mexican border and deporting Dreamers to “home countries” that have never in memory been their homes. And it’s no surprise that one main character, Arthur, writes a successful blog, Art in Nature–even though he is never out in nature and is rarely artful; it’s all just BS for attention and self-gratification.
The family story: It’s almost Christmas, and Art and his fiancée Charlotte have committed to spend the holiday with his mother, Sophie, in Cornwall. But there’s a problem: Charlotte, an environmental activist, has called out Art for his lack of any real commitment to pro-nature causes, finally having had enough of the BS. (There’s symbolism in the fact that she destroys his laptop on her way out.) But does Art call Sophie and explain the breakup? Of course not. Instead, he hires a young Croatian girl who looks like she could use some cash to pretend to be Charlotte. Lux turns out to be the quiet hero of the novel.
Sophie and Art don’t get along. Sophie, a once-successful businesswoman, doesn’t get along with her aging hippie sister, Iris, who is always off somewhere saving the world. And lately, Sophie has been seeing things . . . namely, the floating head of a young child. It’s Lux who tells Art that he must call Iris and tell her to come at once, despite the sisters’ animosity.
Enough said about the plot. The novel moves back and forth among the family members and back and forth in time through their memories, yet it always comes back to the present day, asking, How did we get to this place? Full of Smith’s usual wordplay and spot-on metaphors, Winter gives us bittersweet glimpses of the art that once was and the nature that we’re losing, yet somehow we’re left not so much with a sense of doom as a ray of hope. I can’t describe it any better than that without giving away far too much and making it sound like something it isn’t. Read it. Find out for yourself. When you’re done, you’ll want to read it again.