A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.

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 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.

Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now.

*****

'Dazzling . . . Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen' Daily Telegraph

'Graceful, mischievous, joyful . . . Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope' Independent

'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit . . . Luminously beautiful' Observer

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of many novels, including most recently Autumn, Winter and Spring in the 'Seasonal' quartet. Her 2014 novel How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. She has also been shortlisted once for the Orwell Prize, twice for the Orange Prize and four times for the Man Booker Prize, among many other prizes. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.