Val McDermid’s Winter Made Me Fall Back in Love with the Season

  

Val McDermid’s Winter caught me at exactly the right moment. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the season: as a child I adored it, as a working adult I tolerated it, and now, creeping toward what the poets politely call “the winter of life,” I mostly dread it. Yet somehow this slim, illustrated volume turned the gloom around for me. Reading it felt less like opening a book and more like settling down for a long, fireside chat with an old friend who happens to love the very things I’ve started to resent—the iron-cold air, the early dark, the whole damp Scottish midwinter package.

McDermid writes with the ease of someone talking across a kitchen table, drifting between memories of childhood sledging in Fife, Hogmanay in Edinburgh, night trains to London, and the proper way to carve a neep. Philip Harris’s delicate illustrations are far more than decoration; they give the pages the glow of lantern light on snow. I found myself lingering over them the way you linger over a Christmas card from someone you actually like. Along the way you pick up gentle insights into how she plots her novels (scribbled notes on random scraps of paper—comfortingly chaotic), and you’re reminded of traditions—Up Helly Aa, First Footing, Burns Night—that still matter in a country that refuses to let winter have the last word unchallenged.

By the final page I was surprised to feel something close to affection for the season again, or at least for its stories. McDermid handed me a borrowed coat of Edinburgh snow and made it fit. If you’ve ever loved winter and then fallen out with it, this gentle, funny, beautifully made little book is the reconciliation you didn’t know you needed.

It is being released today. You can (and you MUST!) get a copy here.

 Disclaimer: I received an advanced digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. 

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.