The Wood at Midwinter
The Times Top Ten bestseller
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
**The Times instant Top Ten bestseller**
**Named a book to look out for in 2024 by the Sunday Times, Guardian and BBC**
**A small hardback edition featuring an afterword by the author**
From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting and haunting Christmas short story
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'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'
Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees – and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.
One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst – and the path of her life is changed forever.
'Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke has made the very notion of genre seem quaint' Guardian
'A miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling' Madeline Miller
**With exquisite illustrations by Victoria Sawdon**
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo Award winner Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) enchants with this bite-size Christmassy fairy tale. Readers meet sisters Isolde and Merowdis Scot on a snowy sleigh ride with Merowdis's two dogs and one pet pig (to say nothing of the cats, birds, ferret, and other wild creatures waiting for her at home). Merowdis, whom Isolde believes to be a saint due to her inability to comprehend the difference between animals and people, is misunderstood by the rest of the family and discouraged from visiting the nearby woods, but Isolde is happy to help her and her pets slip away on a nature walk. The trees show Merowdis a vision of herself as a mother to a wriggling bear cub, a destiny she happily embraces, despite knowing it will tear her from the human world. Sawdon's whimsical illustrations add charm, and a fascinating endnote from Clarke reveals her thought process while writing: "Snow always seems to me to signal a quietening of the spirit, a different sort of consciousness. And then obviously I added a pig, because there ought to be more pigs in books." The juxtaposition of thoughtful and sometimes unsettling atmospherics with quirky enjoyment delights. This is an ideal stocking stuffer.
