Winter's Tales

A reading list for the coldest months of the year

Ah, winter. Cold grey days that chill the bones and long, dark evenings inching slowly towards night. In short, perfect conditions for reading, for who wants to venture outside when you can be tucked up somewhere warm indoors with a book?

I’m quite partial to seasonal reading: The Go-Between in summer, The Haunting of Hill House at Halloween but there’s something particularly satisfying about reading a wintery book during the coldest months of the year. It can, of course, be a wonderful way to get into the festive mood but it’s also an opportunity to step back from all of the busyness and incessant noise that seems to be a corollary of that these days.

Winter is a time to slow down, to take stock and recuperate. Creating a moment to read, to immerse ourselves in other stories and worlds is an act of self-care. It’s an opportunity to embrace the slowness of the season rather than rail against it.

So with that in mind, I’m sharing some of my favourite seasonal novels. Of course it wouldn’t be a wintery reading list without Christmas classics like A Christmas Carol and Little Women but I’ve chosen some titles which aren’t quite as festive because sometimes we all just want a bit of escapism.

The Secret History by Donna Tart

The OG of dark academia, this is a gripping tale of secrets and murder set on a snowbound New England college campus.

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Kawabata’s slender masterpiece is a meditation about beauty and love centring on the affair between a married man and a geisha in an isolated hot spring town in the mountains.

The Ice Palace by Tarjej Vasaas

The Norwegian classic is a haunting book about the friendship between two eleven-year old girls. Full of exquisite imagery, this one stayed with me long after I’d turned the last page.

The Land in Winter

Andrew Miller’s Booker Prize-nominated novel examines the marriages of two very different couples during the freezing winter of 1962-3. It’s both an intimate story and an examination of a country still reeling from the shockwaves from the Second World War and because it’s Andrew Miller it’s tenderly nuanced and beautifully written.

A Maigret Christmas by Georges Simenon

If you’ve followed me here from Instagram you’ll know I’m a huge Maigret fan. The three stories in this collection may not be the best and Maigret only features in one but they all bear Simenon’s trademarks: intriguing crimes, evocative Paris settings and and deep psychological insight.

Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

A ridiculous yet ridiculously entertaining spy thriller in which a charismatic academic must break into a secret Soviet research base deep in Siberia. I read this at the height of a Sicilian summer but Davidson is so good at conjuring up the Siberian cold I actually found myself feeling the chill.

Winter Solstice by Rosamund Pilcher

It’s easy to be a bit sniffy about Pilcher’s middle class world but it’s a world she depicts brilliantly, elevating the tropes of romantic fiction with her intelligence and keen sense of character and place. In Winter Solstice, her final novel, a disparate cast of characters are thrown together in a house in the far north of Scotland. It’s an undemanding but delightful story which is perfect for this time of year.

The Dead of Winter by Nicola Upton

This is the ninth in Upson’s series of novels featuring real-life crime novelist Josephine Tey as the heroine. Like some of the best Golden age murder mystery, it has an island setting, this time St Michael’s Mount. Yes, I’m biased because it’s right on my doorstep and I’m a sucker for anything with a Cornish setting, but it’s a very entertaining read.

Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford

One of Mitford’s early novels, this is comedy of errors featuring a group of Bright Young Things holed up at a Christmas house party in The Cotswolds. It’s an amusing seasonal confection but not too sickly.

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And the rest

Children’s literature is a rich source of wintery tales and I often return to the favourites of my childhood at this time of year like The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe and The Box of Delights. If you’re of a certain age, the music from the seminal 1980s adaptation will now be playing in your head for the rest of the day.

And of course there’s The Dark is Rising, the second instalment in Susan Cooper’s masterful sequence about the eternal battle between the Dark and Light. I’ll be posting about that in more detail later as re-reading it is one of my midwinter rituals.

Food is an integral part of the winter months for me. I love preparing rib-sticking dishes and sweet treats and, like a lot of amateur cooks, I love reading about them too. Diana Henry’s classic book Roast Figs, Sugar Snow was reissued last year and is packed with recipes that celebrate the season. The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater is essential reading at this time of year. Part journal, part recipe book, “This is the story of my love for winter, the scent of fir and spruce, ghost stories read with a glass of sloe gin, and beeswax candles with shadows dancing on the ceiling”.

And finally, for those of you who’d like to explore the idea of winter as a period of rest and retreat which I touched on in the introduction, I recommend Katherine May’s lyrical memoir Wintering.