Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare AND shivering. The summer s leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there s ice, there ll be fire. In Ali Smith s Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith s shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory AND warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It s the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.