10 Books Set in Snowy Places
Stories of winter, isolation, survival, and interior life
Snow changes the way things sound. It slows people down, cuts off roads, and makes escape harder. It shows tracks and keeps secrets. In snowy places, characters can’t easily leave themselves or each other behind, because winter removes the distractions that ordinarily make avoidance possible.
I still remember reading The Snow Child during a particularly cold week, feeling the same hush the characters felt. That’s what a good winter novel does. It uses the landscape to do psychological work.
These ten books aren’t just set in cold places. They use snow to create pressure, mood, and consequence.
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1. The Shining by Stephen King
Few novels use snow as harshly as this one. The isolation of the Overlook Hotel is literal: roads close, help disappears, and the weather becomes a wall. The winter doesn’t cause the madness so much as remove every route away from it. A novel about being trapped, inside a building, and inside a mind.
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2. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høegsettling
In Copenhagen and Greenland, snow is a language. Smilla reads tracks as evidence and surfaces as testimony. The indifferent Arctic tells all to those who know how to look. A novel about outsiders and inherited knowledge.
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3. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Alaska in the 1920s. A couple who cannot have children builds a girl out of snow, and by morning, she has vanished. Ivey weaves a fairy tale into frontier hardship without softening either: the cold is genuinely deadly, and the wonder it makes possible is proportionate. A novel about grief and longing and the strange gifts that appear in the hardest seasons.
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4. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
An unrelenting Massachusetts winter, with bare fields and frozen roads, mirrors the emotional numbness and duty in Wharton’s novella. Winter becomes a state of mind that never lifts.
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5. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
On Gethen, a planet where winter never ends, Le Guin explores politics, survival, and trust. Two incompatible people cross the ice, forced to rely on each other. Speculative fiction that earns every idea.
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6. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
Medieval Russia, winter, alive with myth and danger. Arden’s snow shelters old gods at the world’s edge. A novel about enduring beliefs when mystery becomes unwelcome.Medieval Russia, winter, alive with myth and danger. Arden’s snow shelters old gods at the world’s edge. A novel about enduring beliefs when mystery becomes unwelcome.
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7. The Terror by Dan Simmons
Based on the doomed Franklin Expedition, this novel traps sailors in Arctic ice and doesn’t let them go. The snow here is not beautiful. It is attrition. It wears down judgment, destroys ships, and reduces everything to instinct. A survival epic about what remains of civilization when winter has been going on long enough.
8. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
A murder trial on a snow-covered island in the Pacific Northwest, where the falling snow makes the world look softer than it is. Guterson uses winter as a kind of witness present while prejudice and hidden history surface in a courtroom. Quiet and patient, and more devastating for it.
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9. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
A remote Polish village near the Czech border, long stretches of snow and darkness, a narrator with strong opinions about animals, astrology, and justice. The cold landscape suits her, amplifying her solitude and her certainty, and making everything feel slightly stranger than it should. A philosophical mystery that earns its oddness.
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10. The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
It’s 1970s Alaska. One family arrives, hoping for reinvention, but the winter greeting they offer no romance. Hannah’s version of Alaska tests everything: domestic ties, stability, even the idea that isolation can heal what proximity destroyed. Here is a novel about endurance, about what happens when distance only makes fear louder, not quieter.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Winter is also a season for returning to familiar books. On Rereading, Marginalia, and a Lifelong Reading Practice follows that thread. The Reading Lists archive has more lists organized by theme and season.
I loved The Snow Child.