Over on the other blog today the theme is 'cold', so let's continue it here with a few chilly-ish books:
When Nights Were Cold by Susanna Jones
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (Penguin have an edition coming soon)
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
High Rising by Angela Thirkell
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck
Dark Matter by Michelle Paver
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
~~~~~
To finish, here's a passage from Alexandra Harris's book Weatherland*:
"Like Ben Jonson before them, whose masques had conjured dancing winds and rainbows indoors, Dryden and Purcell had a taste for elaborate meteorological tableaux. In the wake of the great Frost Fair they challenged themselves to invent a kind of ice music. They wanted to freeze and melt the human voice, dramatizing in the process the freezing and melting of the heart. Purcell knew that Jean-Baptiste Lully had staged for the French court a 'shivering chorus' as part of his opera Isis; now he wanted to explore for himself the soundscapes of cold.
The Frost Scene in King Arthur appears suddenly and is associated (like the ice on the Thames) with both showiness and sorcery. It is a fantasy summoned up by the evil Saxon king Osmond as a ruse to make Emmeline love him. With the mere tap of a cane on the ground he conjures 'a prospect of winter in frozen countries'. His masque of coldness is designed with guile to demonstrate that an icy heart can be warmed. In the frosty stillness, the 'Cold Genius', the spirit of the place, starts to stir. The characterization of Cold as a tired old man owes much to the tradition of the year as a human life, changing from youth to decrepitude. Here, in the ancient context of Arthurian legend, Cold seems to have been sleeping since the beginning of time."
