With the winter break approaching, and journeys home ahead, now is the perfect time to start the book that has been staring at you all year on the shelf. Spanning a variety of genres, age ranges, and themes, this list could be a good starting point if you are looking for something to read during the winter holidays. Many of these books have the frostiness of winter somehow threaded through them, in varying intensities, making them perfect to begin as the temperatures drop.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
In this experimental, postmodernist story within a story, you are the main character and you are the source. The novel opens with you, sitting down to read If on a Winter’s A Traveller. What happens from there is a strange blur or reality and fiction. Going into this blind is best. For fans of unique direct address and twisting adventures.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – Olga Tokarczuk
A unique older woman with an affinity for astrology, poetry translation, and animals lives alone in the woods. Discovering a body sends her on a mysterious adventure for truth that tips beyond conventionality. Her eccentric living makes for a vivid picture that contrasts the near-empty woodlands that she calls home. For fans of animal rights, blurred reality and detailed astrological birth charts.
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
This classic’s bleakness is both exacerbated by its biting wintery setting and undermined by the burning intensity of Heathcliff and Catherine’s passions. Moody, cold, and full of yearning, this book takes you on a dramatic journey of desire and its devastations. For fans of gothic themes, questionable figures and anything remotely melodramatic.
The Shining – Stephen King
Nobody gets cabin fever like Jack Torrance. This quintessential horror uses the desolation of winter to rewrite the Overlook Hotel into an empty liminal nightmare. Snowed in whilst watching over the hotel, reality disintegrates for Jack as the ghostly figures within the hotel appear from nothingness and attempt to encourage him to commit unforgivable acts against his family. For fans of book vs. movie comparisons and descents into madness.
Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf is a book defined by its utter loneliness. The bleak, misanthropic perception of the lonely Harry Haller as a self-proclaimed half-human and half-wolf creates an impression of a winter within the soul. Harry’s (or, the Steppenwolf’s) sadness is cold to the bone and yearns for the warmth of humanity’s love. For fans of limited plot points and alienated main characters’ turmoil.
Open Water – Caleb Azumah Nelson
Set in bleary London weather, this lyrical love story warms the coldness outside and reads like poetry. Love delicately settles like snow, opening up questions of masculinity and its potential toxicity when faced with emotional vulnerability. The demoralising effects of systemic racism upon the couple reinterprets love as not just a feeling but a way of healing shared traumas together through centralizing Black joy and voicing shared experiences. For fans of contemporary fiction and above all, love.
The Northern Lights – Phillip Pullman
The first instalment of the His Dark Materials, follows young Lyra and her animal companion Pantalaimon as they undergo a journey of self-discovery and resistance as they uncover a series of hidden atrocities. This fantasy series is enjoyable at all ages and its arctic setting is perfect for December. For fans of animal familiars and government conspiracies.
Winter Hours – Mary Oliver
This collection of poetry, prose and essays examine both the internal and external, through connecting observations of nature in wintertime to the inner winter of introspection. The bleakness of the landscape gives way to an excess of self-exploration in lonely walks through woodlands emptied of animals in hibernation. For fans of the natural world and self-reflection.
The Land in Winter – Andrew Miller
Shortlisted for the Booker prize this year, this novel tells the story of Eric and Irene Parry, and Bill and Rita Simmons. As the couples’ lives intersect at a Boxing Day party which happens to occur during the Big Freeze of 1963 (one of the coldest winters on record for the UK), tensions unfold and secrets come to light as a blizzard forms outside. For fans of historical fiction and complex relationships.
Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh
This critically-acclaimed debut novel subverts expectations. Despite being set during the Christmas period, this book is atmospherically dark. Eileen as a character is complex and struggles with feeling at home in both mind and body. She fantasises others’ death, has spiels of self-loathing and wears her dead mother’s clothing. This psychological focus takes a turn as Eileen and Rebecca find themselves in the middle of an elaborate scheme. For fans of the undefinable.
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