A profoundly true image of human existence . . . This is the intense world of the ordinary, about to burst forth into the radiance of consciousness

What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow's eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow's vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it

A small masterpiece...I enjoy Saul Bellow in his spreading carnivals and wonder at his energy

Bellow's pre-eminence rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches... Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James

Saul Bellow was a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments.

It is the special distinction of Mr. Bellow as a novelist that he is able to give us, step by step, the world we really live each day -- and in the same movement to show us that the real suffering of not understanding, the deprivation of light. It is this double gift that explains the unusual contribution he is making to our fiction

Saul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist

Utterly wonderful . . . a novel you will have a hard time putting out of your mind . . . a gem.

It seems so effortlessly and candidly written, but truly it numbers among the most uncompromising works I have read in very long time. A unique read many ought to treat themselves to.

Relish this instalment

I would like to be given Winter for Christmas

And now looking forward to [Ali Smith's] Winter

And the book I'd most like to find in my Christmas stocking is Ali Smith's Winter

Finally, under the tree this year I'm hoping to find Ali Smith's Winter

It's a brisk, frosty walk under skies that could open at any moment revealing anything but snow

A book I'd like to be given for Christmas: Winter by Ali Smith

It takes you on a journey through time - Christmases past and present in a Dickensian way, but brings you bang up to the present - how can we live our lives and keep our memories and how do we find the truth? It is uplifting and miraculous with plenty of surprises along the way. It is vintage Smith

"Winter" is an insubordinate folk tale, with echoes of the fiction of Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter... There are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring... [Ali Smith] intends to send a chill up your shanks and she succeeds, jubilantly... Her dialogue is a series of pine cones flung at rosy cheeks

Smith is routinely brilliant, knowing, masterful... The light inside this great novelist's gorgeous snow globe is utterly original, and it definitely illuminates

The only preparation required to savor the Scottish writer Ali Smith's virtuosic "Winter" is to pay attention to the world we've recently been living in...What Smith has achieved in her cycle so far is exactly what we need artists to do in disorienting times: make sense of events, console us, show us how we got here, help us believe that we will find our way through...Smith gives us a potent, necessary source of sustenance that speaks directly to our age...Yet we, like her characters, are past the winter solstice now - the darkest part of the coldest season done. From here on out, we're headed toward the light...It doesn't feel that way, I know. But in the midst of "Winter," each page touched with human grace, you might just begin to believe

Winter is a stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history

Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days...You can trust Smith to snow us once again with her uncanny ability to combine brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art

The stunningly original Smith again breaks every conceivable narrative rule; reflecting her longstanding affinity for Modernism, what she gives us instead is a stylistically innovative cultural bricolage that celebrates the ecstasy of artistic influence. It demands and richly rewards close attention. [Autumn and Winter] each add to Smith's growing collection of glittering literary paving stones, along a path that's hopefully leading toward the Nobel she deserves. In the interim, we can (re)read "Winter" - and eagerly await the coming of "Spring"

One of the rarest creatures in the world: a really fearless novelist...her prose is melodic, associative, wise, sometimes maddening...'she shares with Mantel and Ishiguro a sense of human caution, a need to understand, a wariness of the high-handedly authorial. All write with the humility of adulthood

The second in Smith's quartet of seasonal novels displays her mastery at weaving allusive magic into the tragicomedies of British people and politics...a bleak, beautiful tale greater than the sum of its references

An engaging novel due to the ecstatic energy of Smith's writing, which is always present on the page

A sprightly, digressive, intriguing fandango on life and time

These individuals converge to confront each other in the big shabby house, like characters in a Chekhov play. At first, hellish implosion looms. Slowly, erratically, connection creeps in. Lux quietly mediates. Ire softens. Sophia at last eats something. Art resees Nature..."Winter" gives the patient reader a colorful, witty - yes, warming - divertissement

With Iris and Lux as catalysts, scenes from Christmas past unfold, and our narrow views of Sophia and Art widen and deepen, filled with the secrets and substance of their histories, even as the characters themselves seem to expand. As in Sophia's case, for Art this enlargement is announced by a hallucination - "not a real thing," as Lux tells Iris, whose response speaks for the book's own expansive spirit: "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing?"