The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis (1950)
There’s no book that summons winter quite like this. The four Pevensie children – Susan, Peter, Edmund and Lucy – are evacuated to a professor’s house during the war and, while exploring, come across an unlocked wardrobe. Stepping inside and pushing aside the fur coats, they find themselves in Narnia, an enchanted land where it’s always winter and never Christmas. The descriptions of the landscape and the weather are so vivid it made me put on an extra jumper the first time I read it. It still works its spell on me all these years later.
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Despite its subtitle, Orlando is actually a novel, written by Virginia Woolf as a gift for her lover and close friend, the aristocrat Vita Sackville-West. It’s a satirical look at the history of English literature and spans centuries, during which Orlando transitions from a man to a woman. It’s a fantastical premise, but Woolf makes it work. The section in which Orlando falls madly in love with a Russian princess is set during the great frost of 1608, when ice paralysed the Thames and people skated on it. It’s full of images I still remember vividly: “birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground.”
Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (2006)
Winter has the best festivals – Halloween, Samhain, Bonfire Night, among others. But the most spectacular is Up Helly Aa, when the whole town of Lerwick in Shetland comes to a halt to watch a thousand “guizer” squad members with their flaming torches march through the streets to set fire to a replica Viking galley. We can’t all get to Shetland for this astonishing spectacle, but the next best thing is Raven Black, where the festival forms the backdrop to the resolution of the plot. It won the Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year; when you read it, you’ll understand why.
Val McDermid’s Winter: The Story of a Season is published by Hodder; her new novel, Silent Bones, is published by Sphere
Photograph by Art Images via Getty Images