I’d love to chat all day about the seasons but I’ve work to do, he said.When I first read this book, I, along with many others, missed a key connection between it and the first volume of the quartet, Autumn. Reading Winter again now after just reading Autumn for the third time I firstly find it hard to believe we all missed that connection and secondly was delighted by how much knowing that connection changes the book (for the better). I won't, in case of spoilers, say what that connection is, b...

You're reading the book about the leaves again! It's not the same book. Same cover image, different season.So no leaves floating about in this one?No leaves. But lots of floaters.Like eye floaters?Those - and others.You do like your enigmas!Plastic floating across the oceans is no allusive enigma - it's very real.Oh right, serious floaters. I won't make the joke that was..Or floaters as in people with no fixed place to sleep.And this book is called Winter? Brrr...Or chemicals floating about in t...

Winter is the second book I’ve read by Ali Smith (Public Library and Other Stories was the first one). Both times I had to recalibrate my brain according to the following rules in order to enjoy the reading experience:-Slow down – the book is short but you can’t speed through it.-Give in to the lack of linearity – allow yourself to float and flit in time.-Open up to the impressionistic feel of the story and language – working too hard to understand what’s happening seems to defeat the point.The

This isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas (Christmas, too, dead) and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead) And here’s another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which Sophia is the kind of character she’d choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of st

OK I surrender. Upgraded to 5 stars as Ali Smith has made complete fools of us all, myself included.Everyone spent so long looking for micro-links between the two novels, no-one (at least not in any review on GR as at 9 November 2017) had spotted (other than as the merest teasing hint) the glaring and very explicit link between the two books - the Daniel-Sophie tryst in Paris that is in the first pages of Autumn and the last pages of Winter, complete with dates and details.The more mundane truth...

Quite enjoyed this though for me it lacked the urgency, inspiration and poetry of Autumn. At times it read like an inferior version of the same novel. Perhaps though my bad for reading this immediately after finishing Autumn. I've got a feeling a six month time lapse would have helped me enjoy it more. Centrepiece of the novel is a Christmas lunch. I certainly identified with the presentation of Christmas as a time when all family conflicts are unwrapped along with the presents. As in Autumn the...

‪I’ve so many thoughts I can’t quite sum up the brilliance of Ali Smith’s Winter other than by saying it’s blown me away. It’s like a great conversation that makes you think all the thoughts. I’ve loved it. ‬I’ll review properly when my brain stops fizzing from the immediacy of reading it.

This is the second in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. It isn’t a follow on from the first with new characters. There are four principals. Sophia is an aging businesswoman living in a large house in Cornwall which is mostly empty. Her older sister Iris is a child of the protest movements, including Greenham Common. Sophia’s son Arthur (Art) runs a blog called Art into Nature. It is the Christmas season and Arthur is supposed to be taking his girlfriend Charlotte home to meet his mother. Unfortunate...

Martin Amis said that there seems to be a requisite period of time before one can write about historical events, especially catastrophes. He was referring to 9-11 and his first publication about it—The Second Plane—which did not appear until 2008. Ali Smith, however, in Winter, seems to be writing about Brexit and T.—may his name remain anathema—as it happens. Barely a month could have passed between the time Lord Soames in the House of Commons wolf whistled at a rather attractive female member

I love Autumn, book one of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, which must be read in order. To me Autumn is perfect and perhaps set the bar so high I was bound to be disappointed in Winter. Some aspects and elements didn't work as well for me. At times Ali Smith's writing didn't seem as clear and crisp as it was in Autumn. One of the stories (no spoilers) was quite disappointing. Still, I'm very glad to have read it. Ali Smith is a very gifted and many-gifted writer and, as a wise Goodreads friend put...

This is a very well written book. It is thought provoking, intelligent and intriguing as would be expected of a book shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Sadly though much of it went over my head and as a result I was unable to appreciate it as much as many other people do.Many of the characters like Lux and Sophia were interesting but they were not fully formed. The author floated a fact here and a bit of history there and I was never satisfied with the amount of information I got. Plus things...

4.5 Stars ”God was dead: to begin with.“And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead.”“Love was dead.Death was dead.A great many things were dead.Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet.”“Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as bei...

Autumn *****Winter *****Spring ****Summer *****Absolutely loved this.Roll on, Spring...

Ali Smith once again smitten me with the second installment of her Seasonal Quartet Winter, and left me in awe . It will be among my top Christmas book recommendations going forward. (Well, I didn't get to read it until the U.S release after the new year.) The book was all about Christmas: visiting family, guests, lights, snow, loads of food, holly, Christmas tree, … but none of these reminded me of a traditional picture-perfect white Christmas. Art was visiting his aging mother Sophia, who wa...

3.5This Ali Smith novel, the second of a seasonal quartet, may go down as my least favorite of hers, though being Ali Smith that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it and that I’m not looking forward to Spring, and ultimately, Summer. I envision appreciating it more if I reread it once the series is completed.Perhaps Winter suffers in comparison to Autumn for me because there is no rendering of a lively, enticing (real) personage, such as Pauline Doty; though Barbara Hepworth and her art are used as a s...

Continuing on in her ambitious season-inspired chronicle of our times, Ali Smith opens “Winter” with the statement “God was dead: to begin with.” She continues on ringing the death bell for everything from modern day conveniences to systems of government to states of being. These pronouncements act like a wry commentary on the uncertainty many people now feel as citizens in a precarious world despite all the apparent advancements of civilization and culture. It’s also a clever play on the openin...

A Winter ThawAutumn, the first volume in Ali Smith's tetralogy-in-progress, was #2 on my Top Ten list for 2017. At first, reading Winter, its successor (how fast she writes!), I was pretty sure that it would not reach a similar standard; it seemed haphazard and jokey, strung-together rather than composed. And yet my sadness at coming to its end makes me think again. If this is the scherzo of a four-movement symphony, it is one of those movements where the playfulness feeds into a lovely long tun...