Winter

As we recover from one polar blast and brace for the next, there is a great deal of pleasure to be found in reading a wintry novel while cocooned in a blanket, cradling a mug of something warming.

- Yes, winter is coming, from the mysterious Northern wilderness which lies beyond a protective wall of stone, ice and magic, in the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin.

- In Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Winter is bleak and frosty in a post-truth world, a world pared back to essentials, in which hidden things are made starkly visible.

- First published in French, The Snowpiercer is a series of post-apocalyptic, climate fiction graphic novels created by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, in which humanity survives an ice age in a 1,001-car train in perpetual motion.

- Mark Helprin re-visions William Shakespeare’s classic as a capitalist fantasy novel set in a mythic New York City, in Winter’s Tale.

- London streets beset by dense fog are a metaphor for human muddle and misery in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.

- The presence of The Snowman links a string of murders in Jo Nesbø’s grisly crime novel.

- A Japanese-American fisherman stands trial as snow blankets the courthouse in David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.

- Three people reflect on their life on the ice after their stay in Antarctica, in Laurence Fearnley’s novel Degrees of Separation.

- The wild winter storms of Wuthering Heights are matched only by the tempestuous natures of its characters, in the classic novel by Emily Brontë.

- It’s always winter and never Christmas in Narnia under the spell of the White Queen in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis.

- In the Great North Woods of Maine, a small town is plagued by freak accidents and tragedies and detective Lizzie Snow searches for a vanished child in Winter at the Door by Sarah Graves.