Summary

Ali Smith’s Winter opens with a list of things that are “dead”: God, to begin with, then chivalry, poetry, literature, modernism, postmodernism, politics, feminism, racism, sex, and hope, among others (3). The unspecified narrator asks the reader to imagine what it would be like to be haunted by these things, then reassuringly states that the story that is about to be told is not a “ghost story,” although it is told in “the dead of winter,” on “a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning” (5).

The reader is then introduced to Sophia Cleves in the act of wishing a “happy day-before-Christmas” to the floating disembodied head of a child (7). Five days earlier, a minute blue-green spot had appeared in Sophia’s vision. After consulting various online resources, she visited a local optician who assured her that her vision was astonishingly good for her...