The Wood at Midwinter

When Susanna Clarke produces a novel it makes a huge amount of money for Bloomsbury. Naturally they would love her to do so regularly. Probably more so now as their other best-selling author is doing everything she can to trash her own reputation. But Clarke seems to produce novels only once a decade. Therefore, Bloomsbury will push out absolutely anything as the new Susanna Clarke book, as long as it is something she has written. If she sent them her shopping list, they would probably publish that.

The Wood at Midwinter began life as a short story to be broadcast by the BBC as part of their Christmas radio programming in 2022. Clarke tells us this in a lengthy Afterword which also talks a lot about Kate Bush and her album, 50 Words for Snow. The Afterword is 9 pages long, out of a total of 60 in the book. But the story is heavily and beautifully illustrated (by Victoria Sawdon). I haven’t counted, but I suspect that there are more words in the Afterword than in the story.

Because this is Susanna Clarke we are talking about, the story, short though it is, packs an awful lot into it. On the surface it is a charming tale about a young woman called Merowdis who sees animals as people. Along the way the story touches on issues of arranged marriages, the stupidity of lapdogs, autism, the nature of sainthood, and that very weird Christian concept of a virgin mother who acquires a child in the depths of winter.

It is a brilliant story.

Is it worth buying as a hardcover book? Let’s just say that, as a publisher, I wouldn’t have the nerve to put it out in that way, no matter who had written it.

Title: The Wood at Midwinter
By: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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