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. 

A family gathers in a large Cornwall house for a Christmas reunion. With matriarch Sophia and her estranged sister Iris are her son Art and who they believe is his girlfriend Charlotte. Art has paid Lux, a lesbian visiting from Croatia, to pretend to be Charlotte for Christmas.

Here comes Winter. Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is out now.