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Title: Winter
Author: Ali Smith
Narrator: Melody Grove
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-02-17
Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 4 votes
Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:
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. It's the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter the second audiobook in Ali Smith's shape-shifting quartet of stories.

Members Reviews:
This is the Winter of my discontent!
Ali Smith has a clever mind crammed full of eclectic ideas, information, passions, allusions and word play. All very positive, but for me her second novel in her seasonal quartet (the first Autumn reviewed by me here 8/11/16) is self-indulgently over-stuffed.
The story such as it is involves Art bringing Lux, a young woman he picked up at a bus stop, home to his mothers huge empty house in Cornwall for Christmas after his girlfriend Charlotte has dumped him. Because there are so many issues and cryptic themes going on, the characters are incidental and never emerge as real or engaging people. Their names are all: for example, Art is all artifice and a fake nature journalist who uses Google maps to pretend hes been places; Arts aunt Iris called Ire is an angry political activist, and theres Sophia and Lux Theres a great deal about appearances, pretence, falsity, fakeness all tying up with the current moment of fake news.
The of-the-momentness of it all will please many listeners, but I found that its so current that the themes have already saturated the news - the refugee crisis; Trump There is the theme of story-telling literally (stories told to children; the Christmas story) and mythologizing including misremembering or lying about the past. There are lumps of etymology (eg of puddles) which serve no purpose and arent arresting enough to warrant their inclusion. And there are many allusions to and word-play associated with works of literature, in particular Cymbeline and A Christmas Carol. Barbara Hepworth, Giotto, Laika the Russian space dog, Samuel Johnson (the opposite of Boris)are all threaded in there too, as is the Daily Mails scaremongering, Greenham Common, the internet (a cesspit of naivete and vitriol) and a number of fictitious acronyms. Its just too much so that the result is merely shallowness as she darts from one to another.
And then theres her idiosyncratic over-use of he said she said in the dialogue which takes up much of the text. The narrator Melody Grove is to be congratulated on dealing with this as on the page it must be a great deal more intrusive. Generally her voice accentuates the feyness of Ali Smith. A more vigorous narration might have accentuated the more stimulating generally overwhelmed theme of Winter: burning anger with our modern world.
There IS something worthwhile in the midst of all this, but its all such a jumbled throw-it-all-in that it has left me with my discontent.
But Ali Smith has a huge following who will no doubt love it!

Cold weather read which warms the heart.
Literary fiction featuring a family around Christmas times past and present. Mum, Aunt, Son and his pretend girlfriend are all quirky, amusing and unconventional as most families are which made for a fun read from start to finish. What was brilliant is just how up to date Ali Smiths novel is, she includes references to current events, Brexit and even Grenfell Towers Fire.