frankie's cold weather book guide

There are very few redeeming things about winter. In fact, I can't think of one. Winter sucks terribly: you lose feeling in your toes, you can see your own breath while lying in bed, getting out of the shower is like being thrown into a freezer. I eat raw garlic every day in winter. I have been told that it is very hard to like me after watching me eat two raw cloves. I think it makes me smell like pizza. No one – so far – has agreed. Wintry life is too hard, but there is one light at the end of the cold, dark, unheated tunnel: books about people who are colder, poorer and hungrier than you. Three cheers for schadenfreude.

There are many books set in cold places, but far fewer where the cold is a character at the heart of the novel. Here are some of my favourites.

South – Ernest Shackleton

It doesn't get much colder than being part of Shackleton's team to cross the Antarctic continent. And they did it pre-Kathmandu shops. There were no scientist-designed thermals for these guys. Just some knitted socks, a kiss on the cheek and Bob's your dead uncle. This is one of the great stories of exploration. It will make your life achievements feel minor and inconsequential, and to be frank they kinda are. You missed your tram? These guys had their boat frozen solid in the sea and were left stranded on the ice after watching their boat sink. They crossed hundreds of miles of cracking ice to reach... a desolate rock. And that's just the beginning. If these guys can endure their misadventures, you can endure an inner city winter. Probably.

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

This is the first one that leapt to the minds of most people I spoke to about cold as a character. When writing a novel set in Newfoundland it seems impossible to ignore the cold – it rules the way of life. As does the rugged terrain. And Quoyle, the protagonist in The Shipping News, is touched by both. The sea, cold and wild, the windswept landscapes, the big business that the landscape begins to attract, and the tragedies that are so familiar to such wild places.

The Vanishing Act – Mette Jakobsen and The Raven's Gift - Don Reardon

Sure, I was involved in the publication of both books, but I also got chilblains around the same time and that's not a coincidence. Damn girl, these books are cold. Read The Vanishing Act if you are after a beautiful, heartbreaking tale of wonder and magic set on a lonely ice-covered island. Read The Raven's Gift if post-apocalyptic tragedy and chaos are more your cup of slush puppy. It's a truly brutal novel written by a resident of a small village in Alaska. He said I could come and stay if I'm ever in North America and I was pretty keen to... and then I read the book.

Last Night in Twisted River – John Irving

The book opens in northern New Hampshire on a logging run. When a boy drops down under the logs into the freezing water, you quickly realise that the cold, the ice and the water are more than just part of the scenery. They are at the heart of the novel and the tragedies that it's built around. As Daniel and the Cook trudge through the slush, I thought my toes may fall off in frostbitten sympathy. They didn't, but then again maybe they did and I'm just in denial. You know what, this book isn't even a great example of books set in cold places, I just like John Irving so much that I can't help but put him in any list I make. One day, I'll be John's editor. And he'll give me signed first editions of each of his books. And then maybe we'll get married.

The People's Act of Love - James Meek

You can't really look past Siberia and the gulags for discussing true barren, deadly cold terrain. I won't try to summarise this book when someone like Irvine Welsh has already done it. In his review in the Guardian newspaper Welsh writes that James Meek's book addressed the human condition 'by raising a powerful question: under what circumstances is eating another human being justifiable?... The People's Act of Love is set in the coldest, most isolated part of Siberia in revolutionary Russia, where the question is rendered a stark and immediate dilemma.' Hard to argue with that.

Siberian gulags and the Nazi camps are powerful settings for books, fiction and non-fiction. Primo Levi's If This is a Man is one of the greatest examples. In the camps, cold seemed unrelenting. Nigh by Elie Wiesel is another powerful book set in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is a beautiful but unrelenting account of survivor's times, the author included, in the frozen Soviet forced labour camps.

I'm not going to start on George R.R. Martin's books as it will become apparent too quickly that I've not read them. But from all accounts, COLD! GOOD! ADDICTIVE!

Any of the classics, Russians especially, will have you reaching for your goose-down doona. Imagine trying to read in comfort in one of those big drafty houses, or running to the bathroom along stone corridors pre-Ugg boots. Perish the thought. Also, you would probably have scurvy or pneumonia and die anyway. The Brits and their cold, damp, misty moors always send a chill through me. How Miss Havisham lasted in that house in just a wedding dress always made me wonder. Was it lined with wool? Did she rub her body in blubber every morning? How did Cosette not get chilblains while trudging through the snow to collect buckets of water when I, a woman working in a heated office with money enough to buy socks and food, got them? And how did they all survive in a time before ventolin inhalers and antibiotics? Raw garlic, see, I was right all along.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg, and I can use that cliché with less shame than usual this time. Considering the fact that most people in cold places are stuck indoors where there is little to do but read, eat and write, and eat and eat and eat, there are so many wonderful books from cold people. Writers were the reason fingerless gloves were invented. And as you sit in front of your heater this winter, drinking Milo and stupid amounts of Earl Grey just to get some warmth into you, don't pick up a book set in Tuscany hoping for escape. Head far north or south, go cold, the colder the better. Because when characters are trudging through snow in bare, frozen feet, you'll be able to appreciate what little heat is coursing through your Milo-filled body.