Best winter reads 2017 – For your perusing pleasure
'You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.'
– C. S. Lewis.
Now that it's winter, we're inclined to agree with Mr Lewis. So indulge in our list of the best winter reads 2017 has to offer. We've chosen our favourite from the Man Booker shortlist, a chilling ghost story and Young Adult fiction that's been billed as the next Harry Potter.
It's a time for curling up and staying warm with nothing but the pages of your trusted companion for company. These recommendations will ensure that you pick a good one. Happy reading.
'The rain falls, the wind blows. The seasons pass and the gun rusts and the brightly coloured costumes dull and rot and the leaves from all the trees round about fall on them.' Ali Smith's so-called 'Seasonal Quartet' uses the tireless turn of the months to couch tales of modern Britain, with all its poetry and prosaic disappointments.
Winter is Ali Smith's follow-up to Autumn in the quartet. Whilst Autumn narrowly missed out at the Booker Prize this year, perhaps Winter can triumph in 2018 for Scottish author Smith, who also penned Booker-shortlisted How to Be Both and The Accidental.
Set in the present day on Christmas eve, Winter promises to cast a critical eye over our post-truth era. Autumn, which featured a friendship between a young woman and a 100 year old man who 'washes up on the shore', was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller, the Guardian calling it the 'first post-Brexit novel'. Don't be fooled by the cover: though the seasons are the theme, it is modern Britain who plays the ruthless protagonist in these bleak works.
