Winter
The Story of a Season
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season’s ever-evolving community-based traditions
Val McDermid has always had a soft spot for winter: the bitter clarity of a crisp cold day, the crunch of frost on fallen leaves, and the chance to be enveloped in big jumpers and thick socks.
In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. Recalling in parallel memories from her own childhood—of skating over frozen lakes and carving a “neep” (rutabaga) for Halloween to being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square—McDermid offers a wise and enchanting meditation on winter and its ever-changing, sometimes ephemeral, traditions.
A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year’s idle months from one of Scotland’s best-loved writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tartan noir master McDermid (Past Lives) flexes her talent for evocative description in this appealing collection about "memories of winters past and appreciation of winters present." In 20 short, vivid essays, McDermid transports readers to such settings as Oxford, where "winter is cold and damp, miserable vapours from the rivers shrouding the dreaming spires," and Edinburgh, where she recalls standing on her father's shoulders at six years old so she could see a public hanging, the bleakness of the deep-winter spectacle tempered by the beauty of the surrounding architecture. Not every section is quite so dark: on cooking for cold weather, McDermid is funny ("I believe the world is divided in two: those who think soup is a meal and those who are wrong"), and on her habit of starting the new year with ambitious writing projects, she's self-deprecating ("The notes I scrawl are incomprehensible to me, even a few days later"). Though the book's scope is modest, and there's little in the way of insight about her fiction-writing process, McDermid proves an amiable narrator with an endearing fondness for the year's dreariest months. It's a satisfying collection of literary amuse-bouches.
