Winter

Author: Ally Smith Category: Novel Publisher: Kalemat (Dubai) Cover format: Paper Publication year: 2020 Number of pages: 285 Book summary: I am amazed that this room at this moment reminds me a little of a Shakespeare play, where throughout the story someone steps forward and says something that the person reading the text, or let's say the audience, hears and knows, but the other people on stage do not hear it during his speech for some reason, or they are supposed to act as if they cannot hear him, even though the person speaking says it in a clear voice and everyone on stage hears it. I think you mean Panto, not Shakespeare, says Art, where the viewers shout disapproval at the villain when Sofia Cliffs appears on stage, a woman of our time, a retired merchant who has always performed work tasks alongside family duties. She is now living Christmas night in a house of fifteen empty rooms. But she was not alone, for a green child's head floats around her like a flying balloon, comforting her loneliness. As the night passes, the narration shifts between the past and the present as if a dreamlike vision before the reader, reaching her sister Iris, with whom she has a complicated relationship, the human rights activist who, in the fifty years past, fought to erase all dangers that disappeared, and her son Art, interested in nature and its conditions, who sails the internet to report on artists violating intellectual property rights. And to this family, fractured and conflicted, arrives this stranger who claims to hold a license to tell the truth, the truth that sheds light on the cracks and secrets of this family.