Winter

Shortlisted for the British Book Award — Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing

The second novel in the Man Booker Prize-nominated author's Seasonal cycle; the much-anticipated follow-up to Autumn (a New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Financial Times, The Guardian, Southern Living, and Kirkus Reviews best book of the year).

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.

“A capacious, generous shapeshifter of a novel...[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 (The Best Fiction of 2017)

“Smith has conjured a kind of dream England in Winter an insubordinate folk tale...[and Smith] succeeds, jubilantly....There are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she’s on fire these days....[Winter] demonstrates yet again Smith’s skill at revealing surprising relationships between seemingly disparate narrative threads....You can trust Smith to snow us once again with her uncanny ability to combine brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defense of human decency and art....Once again Smith has balanced darkness with light, bleakness with hope. Heller McAlpin, NPR

“Smith alerts us early on to the enormously expansive free-range of her vision...[T]he exploration of consciousness itself constitutes satisfying action. [Winter] at times leaps from era to era, often with surprising bursts of joy...Smith is routinely brilliant, knowing, masterful...Extremely funny and seriously angry and experimental and heartbreaking, but never sentimental...In Winter, the light inside this great novelist’s gorgeous snow globe is utterly original, and it definitely illuminates.” Meg Wolitzer, The New York Times Book Review

“It is not necessary to read Smith’s Autumn before her Winter; while the two books share a philosophical style and a playfulness with words, they don’t concern the same cast....Winter pays frequent homage to A Christmas Carol, and Sophia is visited by her own ghost....[Smith] spins a fine story....Winter is a stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history. Sarah Begley, TIME

“[A] moving mixture of the fantastical and the allegorical...Topical, sweet-natured, something fun to be inside.” James Wood, The New Yorker

ALI 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.