10 Books to Beat the Winter Cold

New York Times

27-02-2025

There's a lot to be said for a chilly book, which can be suitably evocative in the dead of winter. But with much of the United States trudging through seemingly endless weeks of gray skies and frigid temperatures, with only faint glimmers of relief in sight, sometimes you just need an escape.
As you wait for the ice to melt and the mercury to rise, it can help to immerse yourself in some literary heat. Whether they're languid lakeside romances, sandy sci-fi epics or swashbuckling adventures on the high seas, the best warm-weather books instantly transport you from the doldrums of winter to somewhere toastier. Here are 10 books whose heat emanates from every page.
Every Summer After
A wistful, sun-kissed romance about young love, friendship and regret, Fortune's immensely likable debut novel is set over the course of a half-dozen summers in the heart of idyllic Canadian cottage country, where the teenagers Persephone and Sam slowly develop a life-changing relationship. Fortune's subtle writing is suffused with heartache, and she does an especially good job capturing the unmistakable aura of summer on the lake in small-town Ontario — a setting that shimmers with heat and makes Sam and Percy's passionate love story breezy and inviting.
Lonesome Dove
This sprawling, Pulitzer Prize-winning western by the author of 'Terms of Endearment' has all the hallmarks of a classic adventure story: An odd-couple pair of retired Texas Rangers are its gunslinging heroes, a quixotic mission to drive an unruly cattle herd from Texas to Montana fuels its narrative arc and a ruthless Comanche outlaw is its menacing villain. But 'Lonesome Dove' is stark and unsentimental. Far from romanticizing the Old West, McMurtry rigorously dismantles its mythology, tearing through a white-hot epic of cruelty, loyalty and betrayal with brutal candor.
Outline
Cusk's bracingly intelligent novel, the first in a trilogy that also includes 'Transit' and 'Kudos,' is written in the form of 10 one-sided conversations, as the unnamed narrator — a thinly veiled stand-in for the author — pingpongs between interlocutors who regale her with anecdotes, diatribes and confessions, all delivered to the reader in the narrator's carefully calibrated secondhand. 'Outline' is a book of almost shocking perspicacity, pinning people down for inspection like butterflies on a cork board. It's also, in its summery Athens setting, drenched in sunshine — a holiday abroad that brings all too much to light.
Dune
Arrakis, the harsh desert planet at the heart of Herbert's space epic, is certainly sweltering, and the author makes you feel every heat wave and sandstorm: By the end of the book, you'll be longing for a drop of freezing rain. And if Denis Villeneuve's Oscar-nominated pair of 'Dune' movies already inspired you to check out the original source material, you may also enjoy the sequel, 'Dune Messiah,' which follows the rebel-princeling-turned-emperor Paul Atreides as he attempts to undo the damage caused by his rise to power. (Villeneuve has said that an adaptation of this book is also in the works.)
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
Pirates, sword fights and seafaring abound in Chakraborty's adventure novel, the first in a planned trilogy that has the scope and scale of a rousing epic. But while the tale is magical — Amina, the legendary pirate at the heart of the story, does battle with a giant octopus-scorpion hybrid, among other mystical baddies — the writing is grounded in historical realism, drawing from Islamic folklore and the medieval politics of the Indian Ocean. Like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, the book combines naturalism with swashbuckling fun, sweeping you away while keeping one eye fixed firmly on reality.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
'The Talented Mr. Ripley' has been adapted for film and television many times — most recently in the Netflix mini-series 'Ripley,' which stars Andrew Scott as the titular con man. Yet Highsmith's original novel remains inexhaustible, as wry and sharp today as it was when it was published in 1955. Its dreamy Italian setting, first on the shores of the Amalfi Coast and then amid the cafes of Rome and the canals of Venice, is so powerfully intoxicating that it's not hard to sympathize with Tom Ripley's all-consuming desire to claim it as his own — even if his methods for securing this eternal summer (identity theft, fraud, the occasional murder) are extreme. The novel's sequels, particularly 'Ripley's Game,' are equally compelling.
Tom Lake
As endearingly cozy as it is charmingly nostalgic, Patchett's novel follows three adult sisters — Emily, Maisie and Nell — who, sequestered at their family cherry orchard in Michigan during the Covid-19 lockdowns, induce their mother, Lara, to finally recount the bittersweet saga of a long-ago romance with her co-star in a summer stock production of Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town.' The lazy summer days and long, wistful nights are rendered lovingly, in prose our critic called (not unkindly) 'resolutely folksy,' rife with 'pies and quilts and nettlesome goats.' In other words, it's the perfect salve against the cold.
Happy Hour
It's the summer of 2013 in Bed-Stuy, and Isa and Gala, a pair of 20-something best friends, are intent on living lives of leisure and luxury — even if they don't have any money. Splitting a bed in their seedy sublet, selling old clothes at a weekend market and meeting men of dubious character at chic clubs, Granados's aspirant It Girls are glamorous but not vacuous, ingratiating themselves into 'important' New York circles while remaining savvier and wittier than the social climbers in their orbit. The novel has a light touch, seared with the heat of an urban summer, but it's undergirded by an astute, Wharton-esque social commentary that brilliantly satirizes a certain strain of millennial angst.
Call Me By Your Name
Aciman's 2007 coming-of-age novel chronicles an intense, short-lived romance between two young men: the unabashed 17-year-old Elio and Oliver, a charismatic 24-year-old American scholar. Both the book and its 2017 film adaptation, directed by Luca Guadagnino, are richly evocative of ardent desire and burning summer love, whisking the reader away to the northern Italian countryside in the 1980s for the kind of obsessive, all-consuming fling that can change a young life forever.
You Dreamed of Empires
The story of Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador whose arrival at the floating city of Tenochtitlan initiated the fall of the Aztec Empire, would be a sound basis for a muscular work of historical fiction in the vein of, say, Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall.' But the Mexican writer Enrigue is up to something much more unconventional with 'You Dreamed of Empires,' a wild, madcap spin on a true tale. Dreams, drug trips, gore and tongue-in-cheek anachronisms crop up on almost every page, while the hothouse atmosphere of the emperor Moctezuma's labyrinthine palace is so vivid you can almost feel the walls sweat.