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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Ali Smith was born in 1962 in Inverness. She is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Following this she became a full-time writer[4] and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature. Her short story colection includes: Free Love and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and The First Person and Other Stories. Her novels include: Like, Hotel World, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, There But For The, and How to Be Both. She was short listed for the Folio Prize 2015. She won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel How to be Both.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
It is nearly Christmas, and Arthur is expected to spend it with his mother, Sophia, in her large Cornwall home, along with his girlfriend, Charlotte. He and Charlotte are on the outs, though. In fact, Charlotte is elsewhere, defacing his online persona after having destroyed his laptop so he can't counter the attack. Rather than explain the uncomfortable situation to his very uptight, very British mother, Arthur hires a girl he meets at a bus stop to play Charlotte for the trip. But when the conspiring pair arrive, they find Sophia sunk in a fit of madness or loneliness. At a loss for what to do, Arthur contacts Iris, Sophia's long-estranged sister, and the resulting holiday is unforgettable for all. In lyrical prose, Smith reveals her characters and their stories slowly, embellishing liberally with symbolism and intellectual references. More notably, frequent flashbacks draw relevant connections between past and current politics that will have even the most marginally informed activists feeling uneasy. Fans of Autumn (2017) will be pleased with this second installment in Smith's topical Seasonal quartet.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE PERFECT NANNY, by Leila Slimani. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Penguin, paper, $16.) Two children die at the hands of their nanny in this devastating novel, an unnerving cautionary tale that won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt and analyzes the intimate relationship between mothers and caregivers. KING ZENO, by Nathaniel Rich. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In Rich's riotous novel about New Orleans a hundred years ago, at the dawn of the Jazz Age, a great American city and a new genre of music take shape as the Spanish flu and a serial ax murderer both run rampant. THE YEARS, by Annie Ernaux. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. (Seven Stories, paper, $19.95.) In this autobiography, the French writer anchors her particular 20th-century memories within the daunting flux of 21st-century consumerism and media domination, turning her experiences into a kind of chorus reflecting on politics and lifestyle changes. DOGS AT THE PERIMETER, by Madeleine Thien. (Norton, paper, $15.95.) Narrated by a neurological researcher whose memories of her childhood in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge start to leak into her present day, this novel is contrapuntal and elegiac in tone, with a white heat beneath. THE LAST GIRL: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, by Nadia Murad with Jenna Krajeski. (Tim Duggan Books, $27.) Murad, a Yazidi woman, describes the torture and rapes she suffered at the hands of ISIS militants in Iraq before escaping to become a spokeswoman for endangered Yazidis. WINTER, by Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $25.95.) The second in Smith's cycle of seasonal novels depicts a contentious Christmas reunion between two long-estranged sisters. As in "Autumn" (one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017), a female artist figures prominently, and Smith again takes the nature of consciousness itself as a theme. GREEN, by Sam Graham-Felsen. (Random House, $27.) Set in a majority-minority middle school in 1990s Boston, this debut coming-of-age novel (by the chief blogger for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) tells the story of a white boy and a black boy who become friends - to a point. A STATE OF FREEDOM, by Neel Mukherjee. (Norton, $25.95.) Mukherjee's novel, a homage of sorts to V. S. Naipaul, presents five interconnected stories set in India and exploring the lives of the unmoored. BARKUS, by Patricia MacLachlan. (Chronicle, $14.99; ages 4 to 7.) A mysteriously smart dog changes everything for a little girl in this witty beginning to a new early chapter book series from MacLachlan, the author of books for children of all ages. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
In the second volume of a quartet, the winter solstice brings with it a cool clarity of vision, evergreen memories and a reworking of ageless myths Winter: the dead time, the midnight hour, the dying of the light. Winter: the time of guests, gifts, Christmas memories, cool clarity, the beginning. In the second part of her Seasonal Quartet, which began last year with Autumn, Smith brings all these winters into relationships that are astonishingly fertile and free. She calls up old stories and renews them, she finds life stubbornly shining in the evergreens. She looks out over a contemporary landscape of violent exclusion, lies, suffering (the book has been written and published so quickly that this summer's tragedies are among its solsticial dark points), and fashions a novel which, in its very inclusiveness, associative joy and unrestricted movement, proposes other kinds of vision. This is not a continuation of Autumn, at least not in terms of plots and characters, but the books converse vociferously as they revise each other's signs and symbols. Elderly Daniel began Autumn with a dream of rebirth and a coat of fresh leaves; an ageing Sophia begins Winter with a child's head keeping her company. Daniel collected the youthfully gutsy paintings of Pauline Boty ; Sophia loves Barbara Hepworth 's sculptures, their smooth stones both primitive and ageless. Lonely Sophia would rather be in quality literary fiction in which the slow drift of snow across a landscape is merciful Child's head? Yes, just the head, not the whole child. The anxious, lonely Sophia, a retired businesswoman, would rather be in a more classic sort of story, "the kind of quality literary fiction in which the slow drift of snow across a landscape is merciful" and in which there are definitely "no heads". But the head bobs about beguilingly in her field of view, a figure of death and life, but mostly life. We are in Cornwall, where the local saint Newlina had her head chopped off, but picked it up and walked off; when she stopped to pray, a fig tree grew from her staff. The head in Sophia's house is endlessly lively: a child, an old man, a green man (snotty nostrils sprouting). All this is the bounty of Sophia's imagination, which complicates her role as the commercial, conventional antagonist to her sister Iris, the wild child who left home to be an activist and chained herself to the fence at Greenham Common. Protest is one of the novel's great subjects. CND songs are its tune as much as the old Christmas numbers. It celebrates those who have thought in terms of society rather than self, who have had nightmares (of nuclear winter, of silent spring) and taken them seriously in every living daylight hour. Iris in her 70s is still tough, a citizen of the world, and has been working in Greece as the migrant boats come in. She does heroic things, but she is not the novel's hero or its central consciousness: no single kind of vision is raised above the others. And there is no answer to the quarrel between the sisters, which is based on ideas of the individual's role in the world. "I hate you," they tell each other, and Sophia rests her head on Iris's chest. Together, or rather alternately, they have brought up a son, Arthur, who is understandably unsure of himself and not much of a king for Camelot -- but then, as we read in the book's first lines, "romance was dead. Chivalry was dead". It doesn't help that Arthur works for SA4A, the invented security company that patrolled the fences in Autumn and is now busy tracing infringements of copyright. He is trying to be a nature writer, earnestly saving up insights for his "Art in Nature" blog, looking up the etymologies of weather words, and waiting for snow (which is out of copyright) to salve his troubles. But this fretful Art, who takes his walks on YouTube and spends more time tweeting than birding, doesn't give nature much of a chance. Nature responds with a giant piece of rock which comes swinging towards Arthur at the dinner table. It sounds like the clumps of landscape in the paintings of Julian Perry, but this one is real, with sand dropping off it, and it's indoors. Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing? Smith loves to bring wild profusions inside -- whether a slice of cliff hanging in the dining room or an evergreen magnolia potted up as a Christmas tree. In all her fiction she proposes that figments of the mind are real things, to be prodded and tended and talked to. "Art is seeing things," says Arthur's friend, a little worried about him. "That's a great description of what art is," says Iris. "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing?" The novel is a pattern of visitations. The floating child-stone-head is a visitor in Sophia's body -- though there's no knowing which part: is it a floater in her eye as well as a hallucination? The optician found nothing wrong, but then the doctor in Smith's story "The Beholder" didn't spot the rose branches growing from the narrator's heart. Smith has always been interested in the whole spectrum of guests, from family popping by to extravagant strangers establishing themselves in the living room. Amber in The Accidental appeared with hair glowing like an angel and became the centre of a family without anyone knowing who she was. Now here is a young woman called Lux, sitting at Sophia's kitchen table on Christmas night. She is a replacement for Arthur's absent girlfriend -- he found her at the bus stop reading a Chicken Cottage menu with striking intensity and paid her to come for Christmas. But who is she? A mythic light, an every-immigrant, and idiosyncratically herself, scrambling eggs, soothing Sophia as no one else can, finding poetry even in her work at a packing factory. Moments of the past rise up into the present as if they, too, were visitors, alarming the hosts and making themselves at home. In the novel's long midnight, the clock chimes 12 over and over as Sophia, between sleep and wakefulness, meets her previous lives. A Christmas Carol is intricately reworked, told in a voice that is Dickensian in its fluency and mobile empathy, and in its capacity to make myths real. Dickens is the spirit of the novel, but then so is the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who is still sending uncannily verdant figures into the festive hall with mixed blessings of gifts and violence. "And romance was dead," we read, but it's not dead here, not yet, not with Smith conjuring in the forest. Woolf's Orlando comes up glinting in new lights: Sophia has behind her the young nobleman kicking an old Moorish head. The winter wonders of her own time are not frost fairs but chemical leakages which kill birds in mid-air, but when she leans her back against an oak tree there is still a chance of peace. Most of all, there is Shakespeare. Lux explains that the plays were the reason she came to England. She had read Cymbeline and thought: "if this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is in the end, where the balance comes back and all the losses are compensated ... then that's the place I'm going". Winter echoes with contemporary versions of Cymbeline 's madness and mess. Little is resolved at the end, but the novel works through correspondences that jump across bounds and make accord between unlike things. Leaping, laughing, sad, generous and winter-wise, this is a thing of grace. - Alexandra Harris.
Kirkus Review
Christmas 2016 is a time of memory and confrontation for two estranged sisters in this second installment of the British author's Seasonal Quartet.When Arthur arrives from London at his mother's Cornwall mansion on Christmas Eve, he's with Lux, a lesbian from Croatia he's paying to pretend to be the girlfriend he told Mom he would be bringing. He's recently broken up with his actual paramour, who's posting embarrassing tweets about his blog, Art in Nature (one of these tweets will culminate in a busload of bird-watchers arriving at the mansion on Boxing Day). His mother, Sophia, has almost no food in her house, but Arthur calls her sister, Iris, who arrives with provisions, rather too easily ending almost three decades of silence between the siblings. Over the course of three days, the older women will revisit the sources of their antipathypersonalities, political leanings, lifestyle choicesand rediscover the affection that still waits beneath unforgotten grievances. The writing seems deceptively informal, with a few glimpses of stunning prose. The narrative can be challenging, as it veers in many directions the way memory serves up fragments unbidden, often funny, sometimes wistful, suggesting a garrulous old friend riffing on a gripe or sharing an anecdote. Smith (Autumn, 2016, etc.) knits together the present-time narrative and many flashbacks to reveal secrets, ironies, old loves, and the unfolding lives enriched by them. She embarked in 2016 on a sequence of four novels, each named after a season. Though the first two can be read separately, Smith has also forged intriguing links between them from history and current events, including fences and protests, female visual artists, and the fallout from Brexit.A sprightly, digressive, intriguing fandango on life and time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It's the Christmas season in London, but there is little holiday cheer for Art Cleves. After an acrimonious breakup with his girlfriend, Art receives a barrage of abusive messages in response to a series of fake tweets sent from his account by his vengeful ex. Setting out to visit his mother in Cornwall, he impulsively invites Lux, a multipierced young woman he encounters at a bus stop, and pays her to accompany him and impersonate his ex. What they find when they arrive is a house in disrepair, an empty fridge and larder, and Art's mother, Sophia, in a state of confusion. Seeking help, they enlist Sophia's long-estranged sister, an old radical, to bring some order to the chaos. Over the course of the next few days, Lux serves as intermediary between the family members and helps them uncover long-buried secrets. Verdict This second installment in Smith's seasonal quartet combines captivating storytelling with a timely focus on social issues. Enthusiastically recommended; we're now eagerly awaiting Spring. [See Prepub Alert, 7/31/17.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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. Excerpted from Winter by Ali Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
