Hope springs eternal, even in Smith’s bleak, cautionary tale

An eternal nuclear autumn is “now globally just five nuclear explosions away,” says Florence, a 12-year-old girl in Ali Smith’s third instalment of her quartet, each of which is named after a season.

Smith’s critically acclaimed books, Autumn, and Winter, written and published with urgency, so that they are very much of the moment and sometimes prescient, are a wake-up call as to the state of the planet and a stylistically innovative exercise.