The perfect little book to get you through winter’s doldrums

We have entered the torpor of deep winter. Here in Minnesota, where I live, the snow and cold keep me indoors in the short afternoons and, too often, napping.

But for Val McDermid, these cold, dark months are not a time of dormancy — they are the most stimulating of the year. Winter, she writes in her new book of short essays, “Winter: The Story of a Season,” is a time of energy, bonfires and holidays. It’s a time of childhood memories and a time of work. It’s her “chosen season of creativity.” After the “wild pleasures” of new year celebrations are over, she sits down and begins her next novel.

“Winter” is an odd, unexpected and quite lovely book from McDermid, the prolific Scottish mystery writer whose books, including the Karen Pirie series, have sold more than 19 million copies around the world. This book is nothing like them.

McDermid has said she will never write a memoir. But what she offers here might be better: Interspersed among the chapters about food and holidays and ancient tombs are brief glimpses of her past — snapshots of a life in full color. We see her skating fiercely across a pond, “stopping with a spray of ice crystals from the serrated tip of one blade,” and reliving memories of the time a stash of fireworks all went up at once when her father tripped and dropped a lighted candle. “Within seconds, the whole box was aflame. A cacophony of bangs and screaming whistles, rainbows of color flying in all directions, a spectacular I’d never dreamed of.”

McDermid moves seamlessly from memories of childhood to reminiscences of holidays and contemporary glimpses into how she writes. “I brew a mug of coffee, pull on my felt, fingerless Icelandic mittens, boot up the computer, put on some music … and move slowly forward, one sentence at a time.” The bleakness of the barren landscape outside “makes it easy to follow strange tracks in my mind,” she says. The lack of warmth and sun makes it easy to stay at her desk.

But “Winter” is more than her memories; it is a celebration of all things cold, dark and Scottish. In short, evocative chapters McDermid slides gracefully from topic to topic. She opens one chapter with her preference for train travel (“flying is too bitty”), and then suddenly she’s on the train, settling down with a book and a “wee bit of water” “smooshed” into some whiskey, staring out at the Russian landscape. “The snow was whirling, a confusion of white against the lace curtains of the carriage, the city’s lights an eerie smudge in the background. … I imagined a fur-clad Cossack on horseback, galloping through the snow.”

It’s a pleasure to move with McDermid as she goes from working in her office to recalling how, as a teenager, she sang in folk clubs, which reminds her of living in damp and chilly Oxford during her college years, eager to get back to the brittle cold of Scotland. The memories are stitched together by McDermid’s love of winter and her love of her hometown of Fife, near the Firth of Forth. How can you not love a country with such place names?

McDermid drops Scottish words into the text, giving it flavor and homeyness — dreich (“dreary”), widdershins (“counterclockwise”), shoogle (“shake”) and dooking (“dunking”) for apples. Then there’s the Samhuinn fire festival, St. Andrew’s Night, Saturnalia and Up Helly Aa. Up Helly Aa? This, as it turns out, is a festival specific to the Shetland Islands that involves marching with flaming torches and then setting a Viking ship ablaze.

“Winter” is about winter, of course, and about Scottish winter specifically, but it is mostly about the things that inspire McDermid and make her happy. It is a memoir of her heart.

Black-and-white ink drawings by Devon artist Philip Harris, reminiscent of the etchings of Rockwell Kent, bring the season to vivid and joyful life.

If this January, during “the poor relation of the seasons,” you’re “longing for warmth and light and escape,” you just might find those things inside this delightful book.