Some books want a deckchair and a long afternoon. Others want a lamp, a blanket and the sound of rain against the glass, and they simply do not work in July. What follows is a shelf of ten titles published in the UK that come into their own between October and February: ghost stories, winter novels, quiet non-fiction and two dependable re-reads. All are in print or easy enough to find secondhand, and none ask for more than an evening or two of your attention. Take them in any order. The point is to read something that matches the season instead of ignoring it.
M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
James wrote his tales to be read aloud to friends, usually around Christmas, and they still work best that way. Try "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "Casting the Runes". The horror is scholarly and administrative — a whistle dug out of a ruin, a piece of paper folded into a hat — which is precisely why it gets under the skin. One story a night is plenty.
Susan Hill, The Woman in Black
Short enough for a single sitting, and a single sitting is the right way to take it. A young solicitor travels to a house at the end of a causeway to sort out a dead woman's papers, and finds mist, marsh and a rocking chair that moves on its own. Read it after dark with the curtains drawn. It does exactly what it was built to do.
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
A novel about the weather inside a house. Manderley, the sea, the second Mrs de Winter and the unforgettable Mrs Danvers make this the great autumnal re-read, and the famous first line sets the tone before anything has happened at all.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising
It begins on the eve of Will Stanton's eleventh birthday, just before the winter solstice, and runs through Christmas in a snowbound Buckinghamshire village. The cold is almost a character. Read it a chapter a night through December, ideally to someone younger, though it holds up perfectly well for adults reading alone.
Ali Smith, Winter
A family Christmas in a large Cornish house, a severed head drifting behind one of the guests, and Smith's usual quick, sideways intelligence about art, memory and the news. It is funny in a dry way, and its observations about family gatherings land harder than you expect. Best read over a few days rather than a few weeks.
Ann Cleeves, Raven Black
The first of the Shetland novels, set in a January so cold it shapes everyone's behaviour. A girl is found dead, an outsider is suspected, and Up Helly Aa — Shetland's fire festival — glows in the background. Reliable, atmospheric crime for the week between Christmas and New Year, when concentration is thin.
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Grief, a goshawk called Mabel, and the flat country around Cambridge in the coldest months of the year. Macdonald trains the bird through the winter because hawks do not deal in comfort, and the book's honesty about sadness is what makes it bracing rather than bleak. Read it slowly; the sentences deserve it.
Katherine May, Wintering
Part memoir, part argument that the fallow season — in the year and in a life — is not a problem to be solved. Cold-water swimming, bees, long walks and the solstice all feature. It is the sort of book that gets passed between friends in January, usually with a note in the front.
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Anne Elliot, a second chance, and some of the best autumn walking in English fiction: the Cobb at Lyme, the lanes around Uppercross. The Bath chapters, with their grey afternoons and card tables, suit January particularly well.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Five staves, roughly three hours aloud, and a structure so clean it can be read in one evening or spread across three. It is also the rare classic that improves when performed. Give the ghosts different voices. Nobody will mind.
A pile works better than a plan. Keep it small, keep it visible, and let it change as the weather does.
Reading in winter is a physical business. A lamp behind your shoulder beats an overhead light, and a chair with somewhere to rest a mug matters more than it sounds. Keep a notebook within reach for the lines you want to keep, and write the date beside them. In a year or two the dates will be half the pleasure.
Ghost stories and Dickens were written for the voice, and reading aloud slows you to the pace the sentences were built for. Ten minutes is enough. If you live alone, read to yourself; it feels strange for about two paragraphs and then stops feeling strange at all.
Finally, resist the urge to finish everything before the year turns. Leaving one book half-read in December gives you something to pick up in the first grey week of January, when a familiar voice is exactly what you want.
Photo: BrickBard / Pixabay
