Winter is the perfect time to snuggle up on your couch or in your bed with a good book, a cup of tea or hot chocolate and just read for hours as cold wind blows outside, swirling the snow around. Sometimes it can be hard to find the right book though, or at least it seems that way to me! The book doesn’t have to be set during the winter but that certainly helps to get into that mood or reading zone. Here’s some books that I have found to be just the thing;
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer- Set just after World War II on the tiny island of Guernsey, off the coast of Great Britain. Told through a series of letters between the townspeople living on the island and a journalist turned author, Juliet Ashton. Juliet feels that she has come to know and love the people living there and decides to visit, hoping to find inspiration for her next book. As she tours the islands and meets the people she has been corresponding with, she finds something she has been looking for her whole life, a place where she fits in and feels at home, much more important than her next book idea which she also discovers along the way.
Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman– Meg Rosenthal needs to start over. Her husband suddenly died a few months ago and she is only finding out now how deeply in debt their family was. She hears of a teaching position at a boarding school in upstate New York, Arcadia Falls. She had wanted to go there as a girl but her parents had not allowed it, so she jumps at the chance to work at the place she has always longed to go to. Her teenage daughter Sally, though, is not excited about moving from their large, modern home to a tiny old cabin on the grounds of the school, nor about leaving her friends behind. But with few options open on the job market, to upstate New York they go. Everything seems perfect at this new school, at least to Meg. She gets to teach classes she loves on a beautiful campus but things take a turn for the worse when one of Meg’s students falls to her death from a cliff-side and it seems like there might have been some foul play involved. Can Meg figure out the riddles that seem to pervade this school?
And now for something slightly different…
The Abominable by Dan Simmons– It’s 1924 and mountaineers are racing to summit Everest, when George Mallory and Sandy Irvine are lost on the mountain no one can say for sure whether the summit had been reached. A year later three other climbers; a British veteran of the Great Warm, a Chamonix guide, and an American, are hired to find out the truth of what happened to the 1924 exhibition. These three are joined by a young woman, completely unheard of in this time but she holds her own and quickly becomes a valued member of the team. As if the extreme weather, insurmountable heights, and lack of oxygen weren’t enough obstacles, there are Brown Coats (precursor to the Nazi party) pursuing them up the mountain and something supernatural… will they make it to the top? Will they find out what happened to the 1924 Exhibition?