Seasonal Books in Order

Ali Smith's Seasonal series is a quartet of four related novels, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, each named for a season and written at speed in response to the moment she was living in. The books stand alone like four snapshots, yet together they build a layered picture of life in Britain around the Brexit referendum and the early pandemic.

Across the quartet recurring characters drift in and out, memories surface and resurface, and images from art, pop culture and history are threaded through everyday conversations. An elderly songwriter called Daniel Gluck and the younger Elisabeth Demand shape Autumn, while later volumes introduce new families who eventually cross paths with people we have already met.

Autumn opens in the uneasy months after the referendum, with Daniel in a care home and Elisabeth queuing at the post office, thinking about borders, patience and the pop artist Pauline Boty. Their long, intergenerational friendship frames a story about how art, language and memory might help when the public world feels both absurd and hostile.

In Winter the focus shifts to a crumbling house in Cornwall, where the business minded Sophia, her activist sister Iris, her nature blogger son Art and a young woman called Lux gather uneasily for Christmas. Old family arguments, protest histories and the stories nations tell about themselves collide over leftovers and strange visitations.

Spring follows a grieving television director, Richard, on a random train journey north and a detention centre officer, Brit, who is drawn into the orbit of Florence, a mysterious, sharp eyed child who seems able to walk past every barrier. The book looks squarely at immigration systems and private security, but also at the ways strangers notice and care for one another.

Summer brings the cycle to a close in a world of climate anxiety, political division and lockdown. Teenagers Sacha and Robert argue, protest and joke their way through a tense household, eventually connecting with figures from earlier books and with the buried history of internment during the Second World War. It is one of the most hopeful volumes, but it also keeps asking what kind of future we are willing to make.

Throughout the series you can expect quick, punning shifts of voice, references to Shakespeare and visual art, and a blend of topical detail with timeless questions about time, love and responsibility. You can start with any of the four, but reading them in order lets you feel how themes, jokes and lives loop back and forth between seasons.