WINTER: The Story of a Season, seasonal celebration of hygge...in tartan

WINTER: The Story of a Season
VAL McDERMID (illus. Philip Harris)
Atlantic Monthly Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.00 all editions, available now

Week of 11 January 2026 top 40 nonfiction bestselling titles from independent presses as sold by independent bookstores throughout the United States.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season’s ever-evolving community-based traditions

Val McDermid has always had a soft spot for the bitter clarity of a crisp cold day, the crunch of frost on fallen leaves, and the chance to be enveloped in big jumpers and thick socks.

In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. Recalling in parallel memories from her own childhood—of skating over frozen lakes and carving a “neep” (rutabaga) for Halloween to being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square—McDermid offers a wise and enchanting meditation on winter and its ever-changing, sometimes ephemeral, traditions.

A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year’s idle months from one of Scotland’s best-loved writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: See, that's the thing about "traditions"...they start, and change, and then vanish. They're human-made decisions, all of them. Collective loss of interest is killing awards shows on TV, which were a staple of my own TV-blighted childhood. It felt immutable: Watching the Oscars was a ritual. It might've been the only time our TV was tuned to ABC until the late 1960s. It was a ritual in my teens, too, among the theatre kids I hung out with. Now Disney's taken it away from ABC to go onto Hulu, the corporate streaming service for things they don't think will earn much money.

A tradition of fifty years shifting?! Whaaat? Traditions shouldn't change! They make the framework of our lives!

They do indeed do that. As Val McDermid's compact essay on the rituals she's made and those she's inherited from her family (her mother's improvised soup a good example) of the cold season discusses, how exactly they do that is a matter of decision and choice. Her wintertime activities growing up in freezyfrosty cold Scotland could not've taken place in my contemporaneous Sun-Belt childhood...I've only seen frozen-over ponds maybe three times since moving to New York's heat island in the 1980s, but that's three more than I ever saw in Texas...my own winter rituals of shuffling up wet live-oak leaves to see what was living under them, and putting out the toad house, wouldn't've made her radar.

In remembering her own place in the march of the seasons, Author McDermid offers us many fresh bits and bobs to incorporate into our own seasonal traditions, appreciations of reading she's done while cozied away from cold and wind, foods that warm and comfort, poems she's written and read (nothing is allowed to be poetry-free in this decade, to my disgust) all offer the reader delights to consider adding to their own lives.

What a wonderful read, what a wonderful gift to (self-)gift to the resistant cold-hater and the delighted snugness addict alike. The illustration, not provided to reviewers for reproduction, are charming and atmospheric, though what I'd call pedestrian. I can't offer a fifth star to something that contains this much poetry. I'd probably knock a bit off even absent the poetry because the illustrations aren't that interesting to me, but I know many will enjoy them.

Author McDermid's fiction readers are strongly urged to pick the book up because it is so interestingly in tension with her very noir crime novels. It might very well have been my most enjoyable moment trying to put Karen Pirie into the time young Val sees her first xmas tree in the public square!