Poignant, haunting, and absurdly comic, A Mind of Winter is a tale of lost lives, guilt, punishment, and the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves and others.

A bitter January day on the outskirts of a small Irish university town, and Fox, a reclusive researcher, has just received a phone call. His former girlfriend Clara has brought word that his mentor and love rival Stoyte is gravely ill and, what's more, the dying man has some final things he needs to say. Now Fox must set out through the snow and ice to reckon with the ghosts of the past.

‘[A] blackly comic, melancholy, existential novel. […] At just under a hundred pages, A Mind of Winter can be read in a couple of hours, but you may want to take your time with it to relish Smith’s style. Each brief chapter is made up of a single, uninterrupted paragraph that can go on for pages and pages, broken by a command: “Up, Fox, up. Up”. The prose is unadorned for the most part although occasionally Smith slips in a Banvillean image like “the slate sky was casting its shadow everywhere, and everything was dimming in the subfuscous light.” […] In A Mind of Winter, Smith has fashioned a bleakly humorous, philosophical, and inescapably human story.’  (Books Ireland)

‘Smith does a wonderful job of conveying the half-baked thoughts and grievances of a disaffected intellectual, and the images of winter are especially crisp’. (Literary Review)

‘a rumination on a life not well lived…clothed in some staggeringly beautiful passages. It's a fine piece of writing, full of admirable craftmanship.’ (Connaught Telegraph)

A Mind of Winter is published by Dedalus Books (2023)