Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .

In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer.

Dark yet life-affirming, endlessly inventive and heart-breakingly human - the next novel in the 'Seasonal' cycle, following the Man Booker-shortlisted Autumn Winter? Bleak. Earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. But winter makes things visible. And Christmas is a time for family reunions, unexpected guests and evergreen truths. It's December in Cornwall and Art's mother is seeing things. Art has problems too. His girlfriend has left so he's paying Lux, a young immigrant he found on the street, to impersonate her - but Lux has no intention of sticking to the script. And Iris, Art's prodigal aunt, septuagenarian CND-er and black sheep of the family, is about to arrive with a car full of food and a throat full of protest songs. Four people, strangers and family, in a fifteen-bedroom house for Christmas - will there be enough room for everyone? Winter casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, art, love and memory, protest and survival.

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet 'A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.' Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms. 'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.'

The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.

'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town's only cinema . . .' One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely? 'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times 'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer

The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet One day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she's been left with after she's spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom: 'Curlew or curfew? You choose.' And what's any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago? Ali Smith's novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.

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