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Winter, desolate. The wind is like frost, the ground is like iron, and the water is like stone, so goes the old song. The shortest day, the longest night. Winter brings things into sharp focus. When four people, strangers and family, gather in a 15-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for them all? Allie Smith casts a warm, wise, joyful, and uncompromising gaze on a post-truth era in a story grounded in history and memory, and deeply rooted in evergreen, art, and love.

In the era of Brexit and the Trump administration, how public history affects personal destiny, and how the sincere friendship between a 13-year-old girl and an 85-year-old man can withstand the flow of time, Booker Prize shortlist; ranked among the top ten best books of the New York Times in 2017; Elizabeth, a British university art history teacher, was a good friend as a girl with her much older next-door neighbor Daniel, and the two often discussed art and life issues. Daniel was an artist when he was young and was a good friend of Christine Keeler, a well-known political scandal model in Britain in the 1950s. Starting from a real political scandal, the novel explores the ceiling problem for female artists in the context of the times, and projects the mental state of Elizabeth and other British people during the Brexit period. The whole book is composed of Daniel's dying dream and Elizabeth's memories of her teenage years, which together interweave a picture of current British social life.