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Summary and Reviews of Winter by Ali Smith

Winter by Ali Smith

Winter

A Novel (Seasonal Quartet)

by Ali Smith
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (17):
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  • First Published:
  • Jan 9, 2018, 336 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Nov 2018, 336 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Smith's shapeshifting novel 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.

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. In Ali Smith's Winter, life-force matches up to the toughest of the seasons.

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Reviews

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Winter is not equivalent to the sum of its plot points. Smith uses her characters and their actions to subtly dig at issues both political and personal. Though these are weighty topics, Smith uses her small-frame story to handle them in a manageable and more realistic way. I wouldn't be able to do justice to Winter, or any Ali Smith book, for that matter, without discussing the glorious writing style. Her love for words and literature seeps through the pages of everything she writes...continued

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(Reviewed by Meara Conner).

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Beyond the Book



Books Within Winter

An integral part of Ali Smith's Winter are the frequent allusions and references made to other excellent works of literature. Though it would be nearly impossible to catalog them all, here are a few.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Dickens' famous work is referenced from the very outset of Winter in the opening line: "God was dead; to begin with," which is a play on the opening line of A Christmas Carol: "Marley was dead; to begin with." In fact, an entire list could likely be made consisting only of Smith's references to Dickens' novel. If you've read A Christmas Carol before, reading Winter will certainly make you want to revisit it, and if you haven't, I highly recommend picking it up regardless, if only to catch all of Smith's...

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Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

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