Winter: The Story of a Season

Tartan noir master McDermid (Past Lying) flexes her talent for evocative description in this appealing collection about “memories of winters past and appreciation of winters present.” In 20 short, vivid essays, McDermid transports readers to such locales as Oxford, where “winter is cold and damp, miserable vapours from the rivers shrouding the dreaming spires,” and Edinburgh, the setting of a piece she once wrote for the city’s New Year’s festivities about Scottish author Susan Ferrier (1782–1854) standing on her father’s shoulders at six years old so she could see a public hanging. Not every section is quite so dark: on cooking for cold weather, McDermid is funny (“I believe the world is divided in two: those who think soup is a meal and those who are wrong”), and on her habit of starting the new year with ambitious writing projects, she’s self-deprecating (“The notes I scrawl are incomprehensible to me, even a few days later”). Though the book’s scope is modest, and there’s little in the way of insight about her fiction-writing process, McDermid proves an amiable narrator with an endearing fondness for the year’s dreariest months. It’s a satisfying collection of literary amuse-bouches. (Jan.)

Correction: A previous version of this review mistakenly suggested that McDermid witnessed the public hanging, not Susan Ferrier.