Monthly Archives: January 2025

Winter 2025, January, at the doorway of gloom.

There are days when the winter sky is menacing and the earth lies like a corpse beneath white-sheeted ice. Gray light sinks on darkened hills. In the nearby woods, trees with gnarled branches hug themselves against desolate winds. There are days when a soul might feel grizzled in such bare cold.

January is a perfect time for a story that sweeps you away into an enchantment. And just maybe, the fiction will lull you into a warm fantasy.

My author of the month is Susanna Clarke. In her short story The Wood at MidWinter, she writes a tale that soothes the soul. I found the beauty of this book was its pace, and the stillness the prose brought to the story.

Our main character Merowdis Scot talks to the animals and trees. She has a deep understanding and love of the woods that is infectious for the reader. During an afternoon with falling snow, as darkness falls, Merowdis discovers her true love and destiny in this fable honoring the winter solstice. The illustrations are striking. Don’t miss Clarke’s Afterword: Snow.

https://www.amazon.com/Wood-at-Midwinter-Susanna-Clarke/dp/1639734481

Susanna Clarke is a New York Times bestselling author. Her novel Piranesi is Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a World Fantasy Awards Finalist.

Review of Piranesi at New Yorker Magazine.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/14/susanna-clarkes-fantasy-world-of-interiors

Many readers know Clarke for her most famous and beloved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, which I am reading now and loving every page. All 800 of them. This is a novel that you sink into for a deep long read and what better month to make such a read than during January’s wintry days?

The characters become like family members and the magic is superb. This saga holds so much classic enchantment and charm, I  cannot stop reading it. The time is 1806 in England and the subject is magic and magicians, their rivalry, secret dabblings in dark magic, ambition, lust, conflicts and competitions, love and madness in a world of supernatural mysteries.

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.

Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”

Fantastical and yet completely grounded in believability the reader can dive into Clarke’s mystical journey and be transported into the otherworldly phenomena of the 1800s.

This novel was Clarke’s first and published in 34 counrtries, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. It won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award.

The novel is a BBC production available on Amazon Prime. Trailer:

Clarke was born in Nottingham, England in 1959. She has published  short stories and novellas in US anthologies (Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories) and was an editor at Simon and Schuster in Cambridge. Clarke resides with her partner, the novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland in Cambridge.

Susanna Clarke Interview by Madeline Miller (2022), Youtube: