From Moomins to murder mysteries: the best books on life outdoors
This year we’ve all been spending more time outside – camping, walking or chatting at a safe distance over the garden wall. But when the days grow short, outdoor living can start to carry off-putting overtones of macho survivalism. Which is why the first author I think of is Tove Jansson. I love Moominland Midwinter for its evocation of winter as both heady and sinister: “The evening darkness came crawling out of the clefts and climbed slowly up towards the frozen ridges. Up there the snow gleamed like bared fangs against the black mountain.” Read as a child for wonder and laughter, read as an adult for perception-changing clarity of insight.
For sheer, shivery pleasure you can’t do better than Kerstin Ekman’sUnder the Snow, a Scandi thriller set in Lapland that was written long before Scandi noir was a thing. Ekman’s prose is witty, unsettling and deliciously sharp, conjuring up dark days and a snowbound community riven with secrets and racial tension. It invites comparison with Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow( the novel, more than any other, that made me want to write fiction) but Ekman’s taut murder mystery predates Høeg by decades.
Alan Garner’s Thursbitch is a slender novel of huge scope. It focuses on a Pennine valley – thursbitch means “demon valley” in Old English – where, 300 years ago, a drover is found dead in the snow next to the print from a woman’s shoe. In the present day, a couple – friends? Lovers? Something else? – argue as they walk over the same ground. Gradually these stories weave together, invoking the enduring power of landscape, myth and magic in wonderful language to arrive at an ending with tremendous emotional heft. Next time you walk somewhere familiar, this odd, unforgettable novel will make you question what may have gone before.
Dominick Tyler’s illustrated compendium of words for features in the landscape,Uncommon Ground, is a treasury of the local and unusual that will add immeasurably to any outing. It brought this adopted Londoner up short to realise that Holloway Road was originally (duh) a “hollow way”: a path so worn by drovers bringing livestock to Smithfield from the north that it was literally carved into the land. If you can’t get outside to find your local scowle or dub or witches’ knickers, then revel in the gorgeous photographs.
When you can’t stand your own four walls any longer, pick up Trevor Wood’s The Man on the Street, a Newcastle mystery whose protagonist is a veteran with a complicated past. So far, so cliched – but Jimmy is also homeless, and that’s how he becomes the witness to a murder. Wood is unflinching about the hardships Jimmy faces, dossing in corners “where the chances of someone pissing on you in your sleep are pretty low” or struggling against suspicion and
contempt when he tries to speak up. The Man on the Street is an eloquent plea to respect those who have no choice but to live outdoors, smuggled inside a ferociously entertaining thriller.
Thirty-four years after it was first published, Barry Lopez’s naturalistic epic Arctic Dreams is more relevant than ever. Lopez combines nature writing at its finest, a history of arctic exploration, reflections on Inuit culture and musings on psychology, time and place, but it’s most astonishing for the exquisite quality of his noticing, and his ability to conjure beauty from the most introverted landscape. The prose shimmers. Dip in to shift your mental gears, and emerge with the ability to see the world – and yourself – differently.
• Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney is published by Quercus(£7.99). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.