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's shape-shifting quartet of novels 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.