Winter

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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.“Brilliant. . . . The light inside this great novelist’s gorgeous snow globe is utterly original.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant. . . . Once again [she] has balanced darkness with light, bleakness with hope.” —NPR

“Virtuosic. . . . Smith gives us a potent, necessary source of sustenance that speaks directly to our age.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Moving. . . . You finish an Ali Smith book . . . certain that you have been in the presence of an artist who rarely sounds like anyone else.” —The New Yorker
 
“Winter is a triumph of imagination. . . . Luminous. . . . Fascinating.” —The Atlantic

“Brilliant, breathtakingly immediate. . . . While this seasonal quartet has its angry and agonized passages . . . its creator wants to remind us that the pendulum can swing back and that one day the sun will return.” —Slate

“There are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring.” —The New York Times 

“Breathtaking. . . . [Smith] is one of the rarest creatures in the world: a really fearless novelist.” —Chicago Tribune

“Winter is a stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history. The outlook at the end is dark, but soon enough Spring will come, and then maybe the threatening icicles will thaw and the buds of hope will push through.” —Time

“The second in Smith’s quartet of seasonal novels displays her mastery at weaving allusive magic into the tragicomedies of British people and politics. . . . A bleak, beautiful tale.” —Vulture

“Magnificent. . . . Stunningly original. . . . Ali Smith is writing a classic, one mind-blowing installment at a time.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Astonishingly fertile and free. . . . Dickensian in its fluency and mobile empathy. . . . [Smith] fashions a novel which, in its very inclusiveness, associative joy and unrestricted movement, proposes other kinds of vision. . . .   Leaping, laughing, sad, generous and winter-wise, this is a thing of grace.” —The Guardian

“These novels seek to bring our time and deep time together. . . . If Ali Smith’s four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of artistic responses to ‘this mad and bitter mess’ of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker midwinter than people often fear.” —Financial Times

“Luminously beautiful. . . . A novel of great ferocity, tenderness, righteous anger and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised. . . . There is forgiveness here, and song, and comic resolution of sorts, but the abiding image is of the tenacity of nature and light.” —The Observer (London)

“One of Britain’s most important novelists. . . . Winter is narrated with Smith’s customary stylistic brio . . . punctuated with clever word play. . . . Heartwarming.” —The Irish TimesALI SMITH was born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962 and lives in Cambridge, England. She is the author of Autumn, How to be both, There but for the, Artful, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and other stories, The Whole Story and other stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and other stories. Hotel World and The Accidental were both short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.On a late summer day in 1981 two young women are standing outside a typical ironmonger’s on the high street of a southern English town. There is a sign above the door in the shape of a door key, on it the words KEYS CUT. There’ll be a high smell of creosote, oil, paraffin, lawn treatment stuff. There’ll be brushheads with handles, brushheads without handles, handles by themselves, for sale. What else? Rakes, spades, forks, a garden roller, a wall of stepladders, a tin bath full of bags of compost. Calor gas bottles, saucepans, frying pans, mopheads, charcoal, folding stools made of wood, a plastic bucket of plungers, stacked packs of sandpaper, sacks of sand in a wheelbarrow, metal doormats, axes, hammers, a camping stove or two, hessian carpet mats, stuff for curtains, stuff for curtain rails, stuff for screwing curtain rails to walls and pelmets, pliers, screwdrivers, bulbs, lamps, pails, pegs, laundry baskets. Saws, of all sizes. EVERYTHING FOR THE HOME.
 
But it’s the flowers, lobelia, alyssum, and the racks of the bright coloured seed packets the women will remember most when they talk about it afterwards.
 
They say hello to the man behind the counter. They stand by the rolls of chains of different widths. They compare the price per yard. They calculate. One of them pulls a length of slim chain; it unrolls and clinks against itself, and the other stands in front of her pretending to look at something else while she passes the chain around her hips and measures it against herself.
 
They look at each other and shrug. They’ve no idea how long or short.
 
So they check how much money they’ve got. Under £10. They consider padlocks. They’ll need to buy four. If they buy the smaller cheaper type of padlock it’ll leave enough money for roughly three yards of it.
 
The ironmonger cuts the lengths for them. They pay him. The bell above the door will have clanged behind them. They’ll have stepped back out into the town in its long English shadows, its summer languor.
 
Nobody looks at them. Nobody on the sleepy sunny street even gives them a second glance. They stand on the kerb. This town’s high street seems unusually wide now. Was it this wide before they went into the shop, and they just didn’t notice?
 
They don’t dare to laugh till they’re out of the town and back on the road walking the miles towards the others, and then they do. Then they laugh like anything.
 
Imagine them arm‑in‑arm in the warmth, one swinging the bag jangling the lengths of chain in it and singing to make the other laugh, jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way, the other with the padlocks complete with their miniature keys in her pockets, and the grasses in the verges on both sides of the road they’re on summer-yellow and shot through with the weeds, the wildflowers.US

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