Winter: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons

Description

Winter is a withdrawal: quiet and dark and cold. But in the dim light frost shimmers, stars twinkle and hearths blaze as we come together to keep out the chill. In spite of the season, life persists: visiting birds fill our skies, familiar creatures find clever ways to survive, and the world reveals winter riches to those willing to venture outdoors. In prose and poetry spanning seven hundred years, Winter delights in the brisk pleasures and enduring beauty of the year's turning. Featuring new writing from Patrick Barkham, Satish Kumar and Anita Sethi, extracts from the work of Robert Macfarlane, James Joyce and Kathleen Jamie, and a range of exciting new voices from across the UK, this invigorating collection evokes the joys and the consolations of this magical time of year.

Melissa Harrison is a writer and nature lover whose first novel Clay (2013) won the Portsmouth First Fiction prize, was selected for Amazon's 'Rising Stars' programme and named by Ali Smith as a book of the year. Her second, At Hawthorn Time (2015), was shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award and chosen by the Telegraph as one of their Books of the Year; both books are as much about the natural world as they are about people. She writes the Nature Notebook in The Times and regularly speaks about conservation, literature, and the very fertile ground between the two.

"A carefully selected compilation of undeniably gripping extracts and specially commissioned pieces ... the final book in a fantastic series designed to celebrate the seasons"-LandLove magazine; "Be inspired on a winter walk by writers who adore the frosty season" - Country Walking magazine; "Compelling reading ... what is original about this collection is not just the diversity of relatively unknown talent on show, but the quality of the work" - Tom Mooney, Wexford Echo; "To open its covers is to open onto a landscape which you have not yet crossed and to feel yourself beckoned in. It might be an intellectual landscape - littered with strange formations of thought-rocks you have never encountered. It might be an emotional landscape - bathed in the colour of an unfamiliar sky. It might even be a spiritual one, animated by the sound of an unheard yet strangely familiar melody. ... This book will take you from mountain heights to urban jungle, and from the back of a cow shed to the slippery deck of an 18th Century sailing ship. ... If you want a book to help reduce your heating bills this Winter, this could be it. The cosy effect of curling up with it will work wonders." -- Richard Littledale, blogger; "Packed with good writing ... a good mixture of familiar and unfamiliar" - Mark Avery; "Just adorable... it's the most beautiful writing. Makes you feel in keeping with the seasons" - Karen Gimson, BBC Radio Leicester; "Alive and vibrant, both in the imagery it evokes and in the feelings it arouses. Without doubt Winter, that most enigmatic of seasons, comes gloriously alive in this lovely anthology. The editor, Melissa Harrison, has done a commendable job of keeping this quartet of anthologies completely relevant, with each seasonal interpretation allowing a heartening and thoughtful meditation into the true meaning of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter" - jaffareadstoo.blogspot.co.uk