What he longs for instead, as he sits at the food-strewn table, is winter, winter itself. He wants the essentiality of winter, not this half-season grey selfsameness. He wants real winter where woods are sheathed in snow, trees emphatic with its white, their bareness shining and enhanced because of it, the ground underfoot snow-covered as if with frozen feathers or shredded cloud but streaked with gold through the trees from low winter sun, and at the end of the barely discernible track, along the dip in the snow that indicates a muffled path between the trees, the view and the woods opening to a light that's itself untrodden, never been blemished, wide like an expanse of snow-sea, above it more snow promised, waiting its time in the blank of the sky.
For snow to fill this room and cover everything and everyone in it.
To be a frozen blade that breaks, not a blade of grass that bends.
This is what he wants.

This book burrowed its way deep into my heart. Without a shadow of a doubt, Winter is my favourite of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet and perhaps one of my favourite books that I read this year. If you asked me to pinpoint exactly why that is, I would struggle to form a coherent, straight-forward answer - but I'll try.

The book opens with an elderly woman named Sophia, who is going to get her eyes tested because she is suddenly seeing an infant's disembodied head floating around her. It's almost Christmas, and she is expecting her adult son, Arthur or Art, to come home with his girlfriend of three years, Charlotte. Unbeknownst to Sophia, Art and Charlotte have recently separated, so, desperate to avoid the awkward conversation with his mother, Art pays a stranger, Lux, £1000 to pretend to be his girlfriend. Again, Smith braids past, present, and even future together to explore what haunts these individuals and the things that are currently chipping away at them. It's about the way we write our own stories, block or rewrite the parts we wish we could forget, and how inescapable reality is.

Winter is a prime example of all that I love about Ali Smith's writing. You can sense her sheer joy and delight as she plays with words, bending and shuffling it around, and it can make certain scenes even more charming and yet others even more heartbreaking. It's reminiscent of building blocks, constructing and deconstructing language, and, while she does this in almost all of her books, it particularly sparkles here. Ali Smith looks at discomfort in relationships, even familial ones, where sisters can feel like strangers, where a mother and son have run out of things to say to one another, and Smith handles it with depth and complexity. Sophia and her estranged sister, Iris, are, for me, the heart of the novel, and was easily one of the best portrayals of sisters, especially later in their lives, that I've ever read.

This book moved, charmed, and broke me, and it's one I think I'll be revisiting a lot over the years.