For those of us with an aversion to cold weather, this is the hardest part of the year. Mother Nature takes a perfectly good planet and plunges it into an extended period of darkness and frigidity. It’s mean. It’s mean-spirited. (Southern Hemisphere readers, please bookmark this page and read it in six months.)
 
The only good thing about winter is that it’s a perfect time to curl up with a good book—ideally, in front of a fireplace and/or several space heaters. In “celebration” of the winter months, therefore, we’ve compiled here 108 cold-weather books that keep the low temperatures where they belong—purely in the realm of fiction.
 
This collection features mostly new and recent titles, but we’ve also gone into the vaults to include some classic books with older publication dates. We’ve organized the books into broad genre stacks, although keep in mind that genre can be a slippery thing. Like icy roads, say.
 
We’ve also taken a pretty loose approach to the cold-weather theme. In addition to the standard snowbound thrillers and frigophobic horror settings, we’re including frozen worlds of sci-fi and fantasy, plus a flurry of books where the cold business is a significant story element. (The doomed Franklin expedition, for instance, in Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time.)
 
Click on the book cover images for more information about each title, and use the Want to Read button to add books to your digital shelf. Then crank the thermostat, plug in the electric blanket, and settle in with a good book.

General Fiction

Fantasy & Sci-Fi

Romance