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A Wintery Mix of New and Old Titles: Fiction and Nonfiction |
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Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
by Kate Moses
This engrossing début novel depicts Sylvia Plath's feverish artistic process in the bitter aftermath of her failed marriage to Ted Hughes--the few excruciating yet astoundingly productive weeks in which she wrote Ariel, her defining last collection of poems. In December 1962, shortly before her suicide, Plath moved with her two children to London from the Hughes's home in Devon. Focusing on the weeks after their arrival, but weaving back through the years of Plath's marriage, Kate Moses imagines the poet juggling the demands of motherhood and muse, shielding her life from her own mother, and by turns cherishing and demonizing her relationship with Ted. Richly imagined yet meticulously faithful to the actual events of Plath's life, Wintering is a remarkable portrait of the moments of bravery and exhilaration that Plath found among the isolation and terror of her depression
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Winter in the Air
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a cafâe before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife ... Witty and subversive, [Warner's] stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches --
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The Land in Winter
by Andrew Miller
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZENEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICENPR BEST BOOK OF 2025NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025WINNER2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction2025 Winston Graham Historical Prize for FictionTender, elegant, soulful and perfect...Superb.--Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of OrbitalDecember 1962: In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them.On the farm nearby lives Irene's mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer's wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget.When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way--ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory--so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.An exquisite, page-turning examination of relationships, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling--proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of the most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight.--Hilary MantelThis book is really special.--Sarah Jessica Parker, 2025 Booker Prize Judge
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Winter Stories
by Ingvild Rishøi
The internationally acclaimed and nationally bestselling author of Brightly Shining returns with a trio of tender, powerful stories of courage and overcoming adversityIngvild Rish i is one of Scandinavia's most revered literary voices, winner of the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy, and her American debut Brightly Shining made her into a national bestseller and earned her a wide English-language readership. Now, in the highly acclaimed and award-winning Winter Stories, Rish i paints three vivid and evocative portraits of the lives of those existing on the fringes of society.A young mother in financial trouble tries to steal a pair of underwear in front of the watchful eyes of her young daughter. A man fresh out of prison struggles to reintegrate into a daunting society and become a better father to his son. Three siblings run away and seek refuge in a remote cabin untouched by time in a desperate bid to keep their family from being torn apart. In these powerful and emotionally charged tales, Rish i delves into the complexities of family, poverty, and forgiveness, exploring the human desire for a better life, the longing for change, and the difficult choices we must sometimes make to protect those we love.Winter Stories is a masterful triptych from a major international writer renowned for her ability to say a great deal in few words. It is a poignant reminder of the power of hope, loyalty, and unexpected kindness during dark times.
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The Winter Warriors
by Olivier Norek
A breathtaking novel of war, about the heroism of an entire country against seemingly insurmountable odds, the limits of human resilience, and the best sniper the world has ever seen. November 1939: The Soviet Union, the largest army in the world, invades its small, relatively defenseless neighbor Finland, just three months after the declaration of World War II. So began what is known as the Winter War. A makeshift Finnish army of soldiers, workers, and farmers must face off against columns of tanks and almost a million of Stalin's Red Army fighters. In a dramatic and moving narrative based in part on diaries, journals, and accounts of participants, Norek captures the horror and tragedy of war. Soldiers go to battle with a shortage of weapons, and the cold becomes both enemy and friend-causing wounds to freeze and limiting the movement of the invaders. The legendary sniper Simo Hèayhèa, nicknamed the White Death, puts terror in the hearts and minds of the Russians. Intense, propulsive, and deeply human, The Winter Warriors is a stunning historical novel of Finnish courage and determination in the face of the Soviet invasion-- Provided by publisher.
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Wolves of Winter
by Dan Jones
Superb historical fiction, as fresh, vivid and vital as this morning's headlines ... proves once again that nothing really changes, be it a soldier's life - or great storytelling.--Lee Child AN ENDLESS WAR.A BLOOD-SOAKED BATTLEFIELD.A BAND OF BROTHERS. The epic sequel to Essex Dogs, continuing the New York Times bestselling historian's trilogy of novels following the fortunes of ten ordinary soldiers during the Hundred Years War.1347. Bruised and bloodied by an epic battle at Crécy, six soldiers known as the Essex Dogs pick through the wreckage of the fighting--and their own lives. Now a new siege is beginning, and the Dogs are sent to attack the soaring walls of Calais. King Edward has vowed no Englishman will leave France 'til this city falls. To get home, they must survive a merciless winter in a lawless camp deadlier than any battlefield. Obsessed with tracking down the vanished Captain, Loveday struggles to control his own men. Romford is haunted by the reappearance of a horrific figure from his past. And Scotsman is spiraling into a pit of drink, violence, and self-pity. The Dogs are being torn apart--but this war is far from over. It won't be long before they lose more of their own. From a vast siege camp built outside Calais' walls, to the pirate ships patrolling the harbor, and into the dark corners of oligarchs' houses, where the deals that shape--and end--lives are made, this captivating and darkly comic story brings the fourteenth century vividly to life.
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Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors
by James Lovegrove
A beautifully presented sinister seasonal mystery from the acclaimed author of Sherlock Holmes & The Christmas Demon. 1889. The First Terror. At a boys' prep school in the Kent marshes, a pupil is found drowned in a pond. Could this be the fulfilment of a witch's curse from over two hundred years earlier? 1890. The Second Terror. A wealthy man dies of a heart attack at his London townhouse. Was he really frightened to death by ghosts? 1894. The Third Terror. A body is discovered in the dark woods near a Surrey country manor, hideously ravaged. Is the culprit a cannibal, as the evidence suggests? These three chilling and strangely linked crimes test Sherlock Holmes's deductive powers, and his scepticism about the supernatural, to the limit.
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In a Distant Valley
by Shannon Bowring
Both a love letter and a window into the rural places that have shaped many, In a Distant Valley sets the stage for a final act to play out across a deep winter in snowy Maine. For a while, Rose Douglas believed life had given her a break. She was enjoying a steady job at the local clinic in Dalton; her two young boys, Adam and Brandon, were doing well in school; and their little family had found an easy friendship with widower Nate Theroux and his daughter, Sophie. The possibility of something deeper even hung between her and Nate--until the day Tommy Merchant, her ex and the father of her sons, showed up without warning on her doorstep. While Rose knows all too well his erratic and abusive nature, he swears he's clean, and ready to turn over a new leaf. Tommy isn't the only one who's found his way back to the town that defined him. Lost after a disastrous stint living down south with her father, Angela Muse has returned home to Dalton. There she runs into Greg Fortin, the friend who once saved her life when they were children and finally starts to believe there may be someone who understands her in a world that offers more questions than answers. But secrets are the lifeblood of a small town, and everyone in Dalton soon finds themselves part of a chain of events hurtling towards outcomes beyond their control, where more than one future will be decided. Brimming with compassion and heart, In a Distant Valley is the remarkable conclusion to the story readers have been following since Shannon Bowring's debut novel, The Road to Dalton.
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The Woods in Winter
by Stella Gibbons
. . . for the first time in her life, she was living as she had always unknowingly wanted to live: in freedom and solitude, with an animal for close companion. Her new life had acted upon her like a strong and delicious drug.
Ivy Gover, a curmudgeonly middle-aged charwoman with some slightly witchy talents, inherits a rural cottage in Buckinghamshire and takes up residence near the tiny village of Little Warby. Having settled in with a rescued dog and a pet pigeon, she manages, despite her anti-social instincts, to have surprising effects on her new neighbors, including Angela Mordaunt, a spinster still mourning her dead beau, Coral and Pearl Cartaret, ditzy sisters who have just opened a tea shop, the local vicar, and wealthy Lord Gowerville, whose devotion she earns by healing his beloved dog. But her biggest challenge will likely be the twelve-year-old runaway who shows up at her door . . .
Blending vivid characters and a deep knowledge of human nature, this is also a funny and poignant tale of the challenges and freedoms of old age and solitude. The Woods in Winter was first published in 1970 and was the last novel Stella Gibbons wrote for publication..
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The Ferryman and His Wife
by Frode Grytten
Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and knows it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine as voices from his past echo in his mind, and looks around the empty house one last time, before stepping onto his beloved boat. His dog, dead these many years, leaps aboard with him, and then the other dead begin to emerge--from the woods along the fjord, from each of the ferry stops along the route, from his logbook full of memories and quotations and jotted-down notes about the weather conditions. The people from the past accompany him now, prodding him, showing him what he might have missed before, as he waits for his Marta, his late, remarkable wife, to finally join him on the boat again--
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The Evenings: A Winter's Tale
by Gerard Reve
THE FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF A POSTWAR MASTERPIECE
'I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is, it.'
Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.
This is the story of ten evenings in Frits's life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city street and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.
Darkly funny and mesmerizing, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.
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Crossed Skis : An Alpine Mystery
by Carol Carnac
When all signs of a recent murder point to a culprit who is a good climber and expert skier, Inspector Julian Rivers of Scotland Yard must tread through the sparkling snow of the Austrian Alps to catch a killer.
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Shiver
by Allie Reynolds
A reunion weekend in the French Alps turns deadly when five friends discover that someone has deliberately stranded them at their remote mountaintop resort during a snowstorm--
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Antarctica
by Claire Keegan
A new edition of the now iconic fiction writer Claire Keegan's debut story collection featuring a fresh cover to tie in with her current bestselling trio: the Booker Prize shortlisted Small Things Like These, Foster, and So Late in the DayThese stories are diamonds. --EsquireFirst published in 1999 and proclaimed an impressive debut by William Trevor, Antarctica introduced the world to Claire Keegan, whose short fiction has since captured readers worldwide and established her as among the form's most masterful practitioners (New York Times). Now with a revised titular story, this iridescent first collection of stories draws readers into a world of obsession and betrayal in Keegan's singular, commanding and award-winning prose.In Antarctica, a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. In Love in the Tall Grass, Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In Passport Soup, Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his young daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan's writing contains a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. Often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, the reader feels that something momentous is lurking within each of these carefully sculpted tales.The winner of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Antarctica remains a dazzling and haunting debut by one of the world's best short story writers.
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A Very Cold Winter
by Fausta Cialente
Cause for celebration.--Jhumpa LahiriA novel of secrets and female solidarity set in post-war Milan, by one of Italy's most significant women writers.Fausta Cialente (1898-1994) was a novelist, journalist, political activist, and one of the first self-declared feminist Italian writers. Though the fascists censored her early work, she continued as an active member in the anti-fascist movement while living abroad in Egypt, writing pamphlets and making daily broadcasts from Radio Cairo against the Italian regime. She returned home after the war and eventually began publishing again, winning Italy's most important literary award, the Strega Prize, in 1976. In A Very Cold Winter, it is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men--lost to war, death, or abandonment--leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this hotel for the poor consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through.Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. An introduction from author and Italian translator Claudia Durastanti frames this classic feminist icon for the modern American reader. Tender, thought-provoking, and devastatingly beautiful, A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it.
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Your Absence Is Darkness
by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. A man comes to awareness in a church in rural Iceland, not knowing why he's there or how he arrived. When a local woman offers to reunite him with her sister, he realizes he's lost not only his bearings, but his memory as well: he doesn't recall either sister, nor their mother, the woman buried beneath the stone. As their stories unfold, he's plunged into a history spanning centuries and lives: a city girl drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze; a pastor who writes to dead poets and falls in love with a stranger from afar; a woman who must abandon her son to save her family; a musician plagued by cosmic loneliness; and an alcoholic transfixed by the night sky. Faced with the violence of destiny and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between lives, each discovers the cost of happiness. An incandescent romance about the misfortune of mortality and the strange salve of time, Your Absence Is Darkness is a spellbinding story of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.--
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The Unveiling
by Quan Barry
From the award-winning poet, playwright, and author of We Ride Upon Sticks and When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East, a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica that explores abandonment, guilt, and survival in the shadow of America's racial legacy. Striker isn't entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea. But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group's secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker's past that could irrevocably shatter her world--
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A Pack for Winter
by Eliana Lee
She's resigned to being single. They're on a mission to change her mind. Ivy Noelle Winter is content with being a 31-year-old unbonded omega with no prospects of a pack. She adores teaching fifth grade, she has wonderful friends -- and that baking show marathon isn't going to watch itself. Until a snowstorm and power outage traps Ivy in her classroom after hours...with three men. Rome, the new alpha music teacher. James, the flirtatious beta vet he's bonded to. And Logan, the town's grumpy alpha electrician. Their scents call to Ivy and her body answers, setting off her first-ever mini heat. When the pheromones settle, she gets a proposition beyond her wildest dreams--a chance to be a pack. But there's no such thing as a perfect courtship, especially when the biggest roadblock to happiness might be Ivy herself. A Pack for Winter is a standalone MMFM why choose small town romance. It is part of the Cozyverse shared universe, bringing you cozy omegaverse full of heart, heat and humor.
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Lean Fall Stand
by Jon McGregor
A thrilling and propulsive novel of an Antarctica expedition gone wrong and its far-reaching consequences for the explorers and their families leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story (Hilary Mantel). McGregor's depiction of speechlessness, both metaphorical and physical, makes the novel much more interesting than if he had provided a page-turner about a botched expedition in Antarctica . . . McGregor's carefully composed dialogue, filled with the repetition of so few words, had an eerie effect on me: for several days my own inner dialogue was often composed of the same words, as though I, too, was discovering how they could express drastically different emotions yet remain unreadable to the world. --Yiyun Li, New York Review of Books Remember the training: find shelter or make shelter, remain in place, establish contact with other members of the party, keep moving, keep calm. Robert 'Doc' Wright, a veteran of Antarctic surveying, was there on the ice when the worst happened. He holds within him the complete story of that night--but depleted by the disaster, Wright is no longer able to communicate the truth. Instead, in the wake of the catastrophic expedition, he faces the most daunting adventure of his life: learning a whole new way to be in the world. Meanwhile Anna, his wife, must suddenly scramble to navigate the sharp and unexpected contours of life as a caregiver. From the Booker Prize-longlisted, American Academy of Arts & Letters Award-winning author of Reservoir 13, this is a novel every bit as mesmerizing as its setting. Tenderly unraveling different notions of heroism through the rippling effects of one extraordinary expedition on an ordinary family, Lean Fall Stand explores the indomitable human impulse to turn our experiences into stories--even when the words may fail us.
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Winter Counts
by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
ANTHONY AWARD WINNER FOR BEST FIRST NOVELTHRILLER AWARD WINNER FOR BEST FIRST NOVELEDGAR AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST FIRST NOVELWinter Counts is a marvel. It's a thriller with a beating heart and jagged teeth. --Tommy Orange, author of There ThereA Best Book of 2020: NPR * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal * CrimeReads * Goodreads * Sun Sentinel * SheReads * MysteryPeople A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx. Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.Winter Counts is a tour-de-force of crime fiction, a bracingly honest look at a long-ignored part of American life, and a twisting, turning story that's as deeply rendered as it is thrilling.Winner, Spur Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and Best First Novel * Winner, Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery Novel * Shortlisted, Best First Novel, Bouchercon Anthony Awards * Shortlisted, Best First Novel, International Thriller Writers * Shortlisted, Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, International Association of Crime Writers * Longlisted, VCU Cabell First Novel Award * Shortlisted, Barry Award for Best First Novel * Shortlisted, Reading the West Award * Shortlisted, Colorado Book Award (Thriller)
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The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur
by Bernard Cornwell
With The Winter King, the first volume of his magnificent Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell turns to the story he was born to write: the mythic saga of King Arthur. Now a major television show. The tale begins in Dark Age Britain, a land where Arthur has been banished and Merlin has disappeared, where a child-king sits unprotected on the throne, where religion vies with magic for the souls of the people. It is to this desperate land that Arthur returns, a man at once utterly human and truly heroic: a man of honor, loyalty, and amazing valor; a man who loves Guinevere more passionately than he should; a man whose life is at once tragic and triumphant. As Arthur fights to keep a flicker of civilization alive in a barbaric world, Bernard Cornwell makes a familiar tale into a legend all over again.
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North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
by Ethan Rutherford
Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange. With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well--
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Venetian Vespers
by John Banville
“A stylish escapade that even Henry James might relish." —Wall Street Journal
Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me. . . .
1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman—a hack, by his own description—marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance.
The unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year at the Palazzo Dioscuri, ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo. From their first moments in the mist-blanketed floating city, otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate. Evelyn’s already jangled nerves fray further. Where has Laura disappeared to? How to explain the increasingly sinister circumstances closing around him? Could he be losing his mind?
Venetian Vespers is a haunting, atmospheric novel from one of the most sophisticated stylists of our time.
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The Winter Guest
by W. C. Ryan
"January 1921. Though the Great War is over, in Ireland a new civil war is raging. The once-grand Kilcolgan House, a crumbling bastion shrouded in sea mist, lies half empty and filled with ghosts, both real and imagined, while it shelters the surviving members of the Prendeville family. Then, when an IRA ambush goes terribly wrong, Maud Prendeville, Lord Kilcolgan's eldest daughter, is killed, leaving the family reeling. Yet the IRA column behind the attack insists they left her alive, that someone else must be responsible for her terrible fate. Captain Tom Harkin, an IRA intelligence officer and Maud's former fiancé, is sent to investigate. He becomes an unwelcome guest in this strange, gloomy household. Working undercover, Harkin must delve into the house's secrets-and discover where, in this fractured, embattled town, allegiances truly lie. But Harkin too is haunted by the ghosts of the past and by his terrible experiences on the battlefields. Can he find the truth about Maud's death before the past-and his strange, unnerving surroundings-overwhelm him?"
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A Long Winter
by Colm Toibin
A young man named Miquel returns to his family in the Catalan Pyrenees upon completing his military service. His younger brother, Jordi, will be departing for his service a week after Miquel's arrival. He will be gone for two years. Miquel notices their mother's increasingly erratic behavior and understands that she is drinking. As she becomes increasingly unstable, her husband resorts to drastic measures. Unable to abide his betrayal and her own grief, she walks off into the mountains. A blizzard sets in and the search for her is futile. No one will find her until the spring thaw arrives--
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Ice Palace
by Tarjei Vesaas
How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary' Doris Lessing 'I'm surprised it isn't the most famous book in the world' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers 'She was close to the edge now: the ice laid its hand upon her' The schoolchildren call it the Ice Palace: a frozen waterfall in the Norwegian fjords transformed into a fantastic structure of translucent walls, sparkling towers and secret chambers. It fascinates two young girls, lonely Unn and lively Siss, who strike up an intense friendship. When Unn decides to explore the Ice Palace alone and doesn't return, Siss must try to cope with the loss of her friend without succumbing to a frozen world of her own making.
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Five Tuesdays in Winter
by Lily King
Five Tuesdays in Winter moved me, inspired me, thrilled me. It filled up every chamber of my heart. I loved this book. --Ann Patchett By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria comes a masterful new collection of short stories Lily King, one of the most brilliant (New York Times Book Review), wildly talented (Chicago Tribune), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction. Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. Two college roommates have a devastating middle-aged reunion. A proud old man rages powerlessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. A writer receives a visit from all the men who have tried to suppress her voice. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, this wide-ranging collection of ten selected stories by one of our most accomplished chroniclers of the human heart is an exciting addition to Lily King's oeuvre of acclaimed fiction.
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The Heart of Winter
by Jonathan Evison
Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together--at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and out of their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged. But when Ruth's loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they've created together comes to a crisis--
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The Winter Soldier
by Daniel Mason
Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives--at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains--he discovers a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.
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Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic
by Neil Shea
As warming reshapes our planet, the Arctic--a region that once seemed unchangeable, beyond the reach of modern problems--is quickly coming undone. While the old cold world can still be glimpsed in the movements of caribou, the hidden lives of wolves, and the hunting skill of an Iânupiaq elder, look closer and you'll find a new Arctic appearing in its place. ... Neil Shea blends natural history, anthropology, and travel writing to explore how the beauty, chaos, and power of change in the far north are reflected in the lives of people and animals. He sojourns with a wolf pack on Canada's Ellesmere Island and travels with Indigenous hunters in Alaska, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories. He tracks dwindling caribou herds across the top of North America, searches for vanished Vikings in Greenland, and visits the front line of the new Cold War rising between Russia and Europe. What Shea finds is not one Arctic but many--all still linked by shattering cold, seasons of darkness, and a pure, inimitable light--
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Winter: Five Windows on the Season
by Adam Gopnik
The 2011 CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopnik's kaleidoscopic work ends in the present day, when he traverses the underground city in Montreal, pondering the future of Northern culture. A stunningly beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik's trademark gentle wit, Winter is at once an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination. This deluxe 50th anniversary edition includes full-colour images printed on two 8-page inserts.
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Wintering : The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
by Katherine May
"An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down. Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered. A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing Arctic seas. Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arisebefore the ushering in of a new season"
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The Gifts of Winter
by Stephanie Fitzgerald
Transform the way you see winter and unlock its quiet power to restore, heal and inspireToo often, we prepare ourselves to endure, rather than enjoy, the winter months. The Gifts of Winter is your reminder that this can be a magical season, rich with natural miracles and spectacular beauty, as well as the perfect time to slow down, restore and reset for the year ahead. But to benefit, we need to embrace winter, rather than pretend it's not happening. Part contemplative, part practical, this transformative guide will inspire you to lean into winter as a period of rest and reflection and learn how to unlock its healing powers so your body and brain can thrive. Chartered psychologist, Dr Stephanie Fitzgerald, draws upon decades of clinical expertise and her personal experience of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), to show you how to navigate winter's challenges and uncover its joys. Woven with simple tips, mindset advice and regular reflection prompts, as well as charming illustrations to help bring winter to life, with this beautiful book you will come to see winter in a whole new, positive light.
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Appalachian Winter
by Marcia Bonta
Winter is the season that most tests our mettle. There are the obvious challenges of the weather-freezing rain, wind chill, deep snow, dangerous ice-but also the psychological burdens of waiting for spring and the enduring often false starts that accompany its eventual return. On the surface, perhaps, winter might seem an odd season for a nature book, but there is plenty of beauty and life in the woods if only we know where to look. The stark, white landscape sparkles in the sunshine and glows beneath the moon on crisp, clear nights; the opening up of the forest makes it easy to see long distances; birds, some of which can be easily seen only in winter, flock to feeders; and animals-even those that should be hibernating-make surprise visits from time to time. Appalachian Winter offers acclaimed naturalist Marcia Bonta's view of one season, as experienced on and around her 650-acre home on the westernmost ridge of the hill-and-valley landscape that dominates central Pennsylvania. Written in the style of a journal, each day's entry focuses on her walks and rambles through the woods and fields that she has known and loved for over thirty years. Along the way she discovers a long-eared owl in a dense stand of conifers, tracks a bear through an early December snowfall, explains the life and ecological niche of the red-backed vole, and examines the recent arrival of an Asian ladybug. These are but a few of the tidbits sprinkled throughout the book, interwoven with the human stories of Bonta's family, as well as the highway builders and shopping-mall developers that threaten the idyllic peacefulness of her mountain. This is the fourth and final volume of Bonta's seasonal meditations on the natural history of the northern Appalachian Mountains. Her gentle, charming accounts of changing weather and of the struggles faced by plants, animals, and insects breathe new warmth into the coldest months of the year.
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A Nature Poem for Every Winter Evening
by Jane McMorland Hunter
A wonderful bedside companion for a frosty winter’s evening, with poems to immerse yourself in the season. From William Shakespeare to John Keats to Katherine Mansfield, the finest poets that ever put pen to paper describe this beautiful and sometimes terrible season.
With one entry for every day through winter, from December 1 until February 28 or 29, this is the ideal book to take you through the darker months and find joy and comfort in nature.
In December “Gaunt in gloom” begins James Joyce’s “Nightpiece.” In January, “There’s a certain Slant of light” for Emily Dickinson, while “the dull dead wind is out of tune” for Oscar Wilde. And in February, the last month of meteorological winter, William Morris muses “From this chill thaw to dream of blossomed May.”
This beautiful and collectable anthology of poems derives from the popular A Poem for Every Night of the Year and also features wintry poems by Alice Oswald, Edward Lear, Emily Brontë, William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, and many more
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Winter's Song: Part of a Beautiful New Series from Beloved Illustrator and Print-Maker Angela Harding
by Angela Harding
'When the snow falls quickly, it brings dramatic change. Hare, rabbit and bird tracks become visible in the lanes and fields.' Winter's Song is the final book in a stunning seasonal quartet from beloved printmaker and illustrator Angela Harding. This series will take readers on a journey through the seasons, reflecting Angela's view as the nature around her transforms and evolves over the months. Taking in landscapes across the UK, from views from her homely studio in Rutland to the Scottish wilderness, via the low-lying marshlands of Suffolk and the windswept hills of Yorkshire, the beautiful illustrations and evocative imagery of the prose make this the perfect book for nature lovers and art lovers everywhere. Featuring many of Angela's most beloved prints, alongside Angela's observations and inspirations, Spring Unfurled, Summer's Hum, Falling into Autumn and Winter's Song are a joyful celebration of nature and wildlife across the UK at all times of year.
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While the Earth Holds Its Breath
by Helen Moat
When the cold months make you hunker down and hide, how do you teach your soul to open up instead--to new rhythms and unlikely beauty--and begin participating in the unique joy of winter?Helen Moat used to dread winter. When it approached, she would hunker down inside, yearn for the sun, and wait it out. Then, determined to overcome this anxiety, she vowed to set out into the darkness in search of ways to embrace it.Beginning her discoveries at home in Scotland, she moves on across the world through the Arctic Circle to Asia. Along the way, she finds beauty in the small things that only winter can offer. Helen's quest to dispel her seasonal blues has its ups and downs; slowly, though, she learns not only to accept the darkness of winter, but to welcome it. When she travels to Lapland and Japan, their cultural and philosophical attitude to the season is a revelation.While the Earth Holds Its Breath nurtures resilience and determination, finding a joyous positivity that does not ignore the darkness, but finds something to love there.
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Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul
by Diana Henry
From critically acclaimed, multi-award-winning author, Diana Henry, a new edition of the hidden gem at the heart of her cookbook repertoire. An irresistible collection of cold-weather recipes that celebrate the unique pleasures of autumn and winter, featuring seven new recipes and a foreword by Nigel Slater.
“Roast Figs, SugarSnowhas been in my kitchen since the day I first opened it. Here is a book that celebrates not only the ingredients of the winter shopping bag, the pumpkins and pomegranates, chestnuts and soft, sweet spices, but the heart and soul of the season. Each paragraph is a carol to what makes the cooking of the cold months something to cherish.”- Nigel Slater
Diana Henry’s classic cookbook, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, is now revisited, revised, and refreshed nearly 20 years after its first publication, with a new foreword by Nigel Slater and seven new recipes. Full of comforting delights from cold-weather climates, it features recipes gathered from Diana’s travels to Scandinavia, the French and Italian Alps, Scotland, Ireland, and New England. This is irresistible food you’ll cook over and over again. Choose Alpine dishes of melted cheese; autumnal pies and substantial winter salads; pastries from Viennese coffee houses; festive snow biscuits and – closer to home – Diana’s definitive recipe for warming Irish stew. Of course, there is also a recipe for Sugar-on-Snow as well. These recipes will bring warmth to your heart as well as your home. And Diana’s evocative writing about both place and food make this a book well worth reading, as well as cooking from.
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Winter's Song: A Hymn to the North
by Td Mischke
Winter's Song embraces the deep relationship northerners have with the season. From tales of winter driving to its effect on spirituality, Mischke paints it with whimsical humor, breathtaking beauty, and cultural touchstones.
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Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year
by Eleanor Parker
Winters in the World is a beautifully observed journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England, exploring the festivals, customs and traditions linked to the different seasons. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including poetry, histories and religious literature, Eleanor Parker investigates how Anglo-Saxons felt about the annual passing of the seasons and the profound relationship they saw between human life and the rhythms of nature. Many of the festivals we celebrate in Britain today have their roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, and this book traces their surprising history, as well as unearthing traditions now long forgotten. It celebrates some of the finest treasures of medieval literature and provides an imaginative connection to the Anglo-Saxon world--
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Lonely Planet Epic Snow Adventures of the World
by Lonely Planet
From skiing British Columbia's Coast Mountains to ice-caving in Iceland, explore the world's most thrilling snow adventures. This book contains 50 first-person stories by writers who have completed the routes, plus a further 150 ideas for similar trips. Whatever your level of skill, you'll find inspiration for a lifetime of shredding the snow.
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Midwinter Light: Meditations for the Long Season
by Marilyn McEntyre
For anyone seeking renewal, Midwinter Light shines hope into the dimness of a long, cold season and warms our souls with sacred wonder. Award-winning writer Marilyn McEntyre invites us to slow down, sit, and savor midwinter, with each poem introducing an aspect of the season and ending with an accompanying reflection.
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Sno: A History
by Sörlin Sverker
A beautiful and profound natural history of snow from the bestselling, award-winning Swedish environmentalist Sverker Sörlin, exploring the cultural, scientific, artistic and existential significance of what is, due to climate-change, fast-becoming a vanishing fact of nature. Selected as one of the Financial Times Best Books on the Environment. 'Part a love letter to snow, part a goodbye, Snö is extraordinary.' Sally Coulthard - Author of The Secret World of Twilight: A Natural History of Dusk & Dawn :Arresting Facts and Extraordinary Insights. Sverker Sörlin is a scholar and writer at the height of his creative powers.' Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway, University of London. Snow, a single word, for an infinite variety of water formulations, frozen in air. The study of snow is physics, chemistry, meteorology, anthropology, geography, poetry and art. It is hope – annually renewed. And it is history, too. Earth saw its first snowfall 2.4 billion years ago. The world's oldest skis, made by hand five thousand four hundred years old, pre-date the pyramids of ancient Egypt. To humanity, snow has variously been an ally and an adversary; an inspiration to countless artists and a place of breathtaking tragedy and survival. But it’s always been there. And now it is melting. In 1927, the snow was already more than nine metres deep on Japan's Mount Ibuki when a remarkable 230cm fell in 24 hours, bringing about the greatest depth of snow - 11.82m - ever recorded. Yet it is a fact today that, ironically not only has this mountain's resort been forced to close due to lack of snow, but most people in the world have also never been near snow: never felt the soft crunch of snow underfoot, never held snow to see it melt in their hands, let alone stood on a pair of skis. As the seasons lose their rhythm, and whole landscapes risk vanishing, shrinking too our planet's ability to reflect sunlight, Swedish environmentalist Sverker Sörlin urges that we take the time to look - really look - at what it is we’re losing, in all its multifaceted wonder. And to question, what comes next?
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Midwinter Day
by Bernadette Mayer
Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts.
"Midwinter Day," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again: ". . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!".
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Arctic Dreams: National Book Award Winner
by Barry Lopez
Winner of the National Book Award This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forest, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez's passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of the indigenous people, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, beguilement, and wonder. Written in prose as memorably pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations. Look for Barry Lopez's new book, Horizon, available now.
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Fifty Words for Snow
by Nancy Campbell
A delightful compendium that brings together language, culture and adventure through frozen landscapes as it shares the meanings behind 50 words for snow, gathered from around the globe." —The Herald
Snow. Every language has its own words for the magical, mesmerizing flakes that fall from the sky. In this exquisite exploration, writer and Arctic traveller Nancy Campbell digs deep into the meanings of fifty words for snow.
In Japanese we encounter yuki-onna—a ‘snow woman’ who drifts through the frosted land. In Icelandic it is hundslappadrífa—‘snowflakes as big as a dog’s paw’—that softly blanket the streets. And in Maori we meet Huka-rere— ‘one of the children of rain and wind.’
From mountain tops and frozen seas to city parks and desert hills, each of these linguistic snow crystals offers a whole world of myth and story—the perfect winter gift.
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The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family, Alone in Alaska's Arctic Wilderness
by James Campbell
In the bestselling tradition of Into the Wild and The Last American Man, an intimate portrait of how one man and his family thrive in the most remote of American landscapes: Alaska's Arctic wilderness.Hundreds of hardy people have tried to carve a living in the Alaskan bush, but few have succeeded as consistently as Heimo Korth. Originally from Wisconsin, Korth came to Alaska in his twenties, and he never left. Across the years, he's carved out a subsistence life like no other--a life bounded by the migrating caribou herds, by the dangers of suddenly swollen rivers, and by the very exigencies of daily survival. Journalist James Campbell has spent two years documenting the lives of Heimo, his wife, Edna, and their teenage daughters, Rhonda and Krin, and he paints their portraits in vivid detail: evenings listening to the distant voices from the radio's Trapline Chatter show; months spent waiting for the odd small plane to bring supplies; years relying on hard-learned hunting and survival skills that are all that stand between the family and a terrible fate. But it's a complicated existence, too, of encroaching environmental pressures and the fear that this life might be disappearing forever--and how will his two teenage daughters react when one of them goes back to civilization for her high school years?But always at the center there's Heimo Korth, a man who escaped a tough father and a circumscribed life, then reinvented himself in the Alaskan wilderness, only to witness the most unbearable of tragedies, a tragedy that keeps him and his family tied to this inhospitable and beautiful land forever. By turns inspiring and downright jolting, James Campbell'sextraordinary book reads like a rustic version of the American Dream--and reveals for the very first time a life undreamed of by most of us, outside of the mainstream, alone in a stunning wilderness that for now, at least, remains the final frontier.
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Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
by Andrea Pitzer
In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides's In the Kingdom of Ice, a gripping adventure tale (The Boston Globe) recounting Dutch polar explorer William Barents' three harrowing Arctic expeditions--the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival. The human story has always been one of perseverance--often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration--a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story's center is William Barents, one of the 16th century's greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did extensive research, learning how to use four-hundred-year-old navigation equipment, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents's steps, and visiting replicas of Barents's ship and cabin. A resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope (The New Yorker), Pitzer's reenactment of Barents's ill-fated journey shows us how the human body can function at twenty degrees below, the history of mutiny, the art of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of building shelters. But above all, it gives us a firsthand glimpse into the true nature of courage.
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The Next One: Hockey Scouts, Remote Rinks and Hidden Talent
by Ken Reid
Behind the scenes to hockey's hidden superstars, the scouts who chase teenage prodigies and might-never-bes across North America and around the world. If you attend any junior, minor, or professional hockey game and you'll spot them, often up in the rafters, alone, busily taking notes and calling their general managers. These are the scouts, the men and women who have made the job into a lifestyle, chasing players across borders, working the locals, chatting with retired hockey people, and visiting remote communities in hopes of finding the next one. Yes, they scout the likes of Connor McDavid and Connor Bedard and even Wayne Gretzky, but scouts really make their mark by finding players who will fit in up and down the lineup: the scorer having trouble finding the net; the goalie who stands on her head to keep her team in the game; the quiet winger who arrives at the rink first and leaves last. Scouts don't just birddog talent, they evaluate character and grit and drive, looking for players who can play even a handful of games in the bigs. Hockey's favourite raconteur, Ken Reid, tells us all about this secret club. One scout found himself squeezed into a small car with a bunch of other scouts, including Hall of Fame goalie Glenn Hall. Former NHLer and pro scout Rick Knickle followed Jordin Tootoo of remote Rankin Inlet, even though Tootoo didn't start playing the game until he was eleven years old. One scout worked at a maximum-security prison, only to find himself as a pro scout. Another scout went from a farmer who tried his hand at scouting to being a scout who happened to own a farm. And Reid takes us behind the scenes at the nascent PWHL, where teams furiously scouted their starting lineups with only a few weeks before the season began. Always entertaining, often illuminating, and sometimes hilarious, The Next One is the ideal book for anyone who wants to understand hockey beyond the ice.
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The Idea of North
by Peter Davidson
While a compass might tell us which direction we are going, there is really only one direction to which it ever points: north. North is the ultimate point of orientation, but it is also a celebrated destination for the adventurous, the curious, the solitary, and the foolhardy. In this fascinating book--updated in this accessible, pocket edition--Peter Davidson explores the concept of north through its many manifestations in painting, legend, and literature. Arctic bound, Davidson takes the reader on a journey from the heart of society to the most far-flung outposts of human geography, packing in our rucksacks a treasure trove of stories and artworks, from the Icelandic Sagas to Nabokov's snowy kingdom of Zembla, from Hans Christian Andersen's forbidding Snow Queen to the works of artists such as Eric Ravilious, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Andy Goldsworthy. He celebrates the different ways our artists and writers have illuminated our relationship with the earth's most dangerous and austere terrain. Through Davidson's astonishing but inviting erudition, we ultimately come to see north as a permanent goal, frozen forever on a horizon we never seem to quite reach.
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River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
by Cat Jarman
Follow an epic story of the Viking Age that traces the historical trail of an ancient piece of jewelry found in a Viking grave in England to its origins thousands of miles east in India. An acclaimed bioarchaeologist, Catrine Jarman has used cutting-edge forensic techniques to spark her investigation into the history of the Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now over one thousand years old, she can determine childhood diet--and thereby where a person was likely born. With radiocarbon dating, she can ascertain a death-date down to the range of a few years. And her research offers enlightening new visions of the roles of women and children in Viking culture. Three years ago, a Carnelian bead came into her temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace the path of this ancient piece of jewelry back to eighth-century Baghdad and India, discovering along the way that the Vikings' route was far more varied than we might think--that with them came people from the Middle East, not just Scandinavia, and that the reason for this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, all the way to Britain. Told as a riveting history of the Vikings and the methods we use to understand them, this is a major reassessment of the fierce, often-mythologized voyagers of the North--and of the global medieval world as we know it.
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A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power, but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.
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Winter: The Story of a Season
by Val McDermid
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. 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-- Provided by publisher
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