Winter
A Novel
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3.8 • 25 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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. 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The second book in British novelist Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is a playful, pointed exploration of life in the age of soul-crushing tweets and existential dread. When nature blogger Artie arrives home for the holidays, he finds his tightly wound mother, Sophia, unraveling. Adding to this chaos is the presence of a disembodied head, a street-smart stranger whom Arthur is paying to pose as his girlfriend, and the arrival of Sophia’s estranged sister, Iris, a diehard anti-establishment activist. Infused with Smith’s wordplay and hawk-eyed commentary on our world, Winter folded us into its warm and weird embrace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the solid second entry in Smith's seasonally themed quartet of novels (following Booker Prize-finalist Autumn), three estranged relatives and a charming stranger argue their way through Christmas in a manor house in the English countryside. After splitting up with his longtime girlfriend, Art, a copyright specialist turned nature blogger, decides to pay Lux, a girl he meets at a bus stop, to impersonate her during a visit to the home of his difficult mother, Sophia. Complicating matters is the arrival of Iris, Sophia's activist sister, whose presence dredges up painful memories for Art and Sophia. Interspersed between debates on Brexit, conservationism, and American politics are flashbacks to various episodes from Sophia and Iris's youth, including poignant scenes of Iris's nuclear disarmament protest and Sophia's first encounter with Art's absent father. Like Autumn, the novel employs a scattered, evocative plot and prose style, reflecting the fractured emotional, intellectual, and political states occupied by its contemporary characters. Though the approach misses more than it hits this time out, it's still an engaging novel due to the ecstatic energy of Smith's writing, which is always present on the page.
