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Published Mar 2012
464 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
The story of a celebrated writer's sudden descent into blindness, and of the redemptive journey into the past that her loss of sight sets in motion. Candia McWilliam, whose novels A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger, and Debatable Land made her a reader favorite throughout the United Kingdom and around the world, here breaks her decade-long silence with a searing, intimate memoir that fans of Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, Mary Karr's Lit, and Diana Athill's Somewhere Toward the End will agree "cements her status as one of our most important literary writers beyond question" (Financial Times).
"McWilliam's writing is a devilish mix of the plain and the filigree, the Scots in her always fighting with a wilder, more extravagant instinct; its sui generis beauty will not be to everyone's taste. Nevertheless, it is worth setting aside one's inverted snobbery. What to Look for in Winter tells the story of the author's struggles with alcoholism, blindness and writer's block. It also tells you a great deal about families, their warmth and their chilliness, and how to survive them. ...It is the book's wisdom, modest and hard-won, that will stay with you, not its Iris Murdoch characters with their witty put-downs, their big and possibly draughty houses, their Homer and their George Herbert."- The Guardian
"McWilliam's prose has always had a talent to annoy. It is a wrought, complicated fusion of the plain and the fancy that, viewed in a certain light, can seem positively insolent. Misfortune has not dulled her sharp way with words, nor suppressed her flashes of grandeur ...What a precise, poetic dissection of a life this is; how brave she was, and how wise, to undertake it." - The Telegraph
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Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize; A Little Stranger (1989); Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in its Italian translation for the best foreign novel of the year; and a collection of stories, Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent an operation to partially reverse the condition. What to Look for in Winter won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for literature, the Spear's Book Award for memoir, the Hawthornden Prize, and was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year Award and the Duff Cooper Prize.
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