What to Look for in Winter

Candia McWilliam had just joined the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2006 when she started to lose her sight. The gradual onset of blindness seemed especially cruel to someone whose life depended on reading and writing. As McWilliam’s sight disappeared she looked inwards and began to remember her Edinburgh childhood, her mother’s suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, her marriages, her children and, stalking all these memories, her increasing alcoholism. What To Look For In Winter is a magical, uplifting and truly wise book about families and friendship, love and loss and that most elusive of things – a sense of self.

Reviews of What to Look for in Winter

"One of the most extraordinary literary autobiographies of this or any other year" The Times "An essential book in all of its aspects, a thing of beauty and of unbearable hurt, of dreadful harm and intense humanity…This is the work of a capacious, open, vulnerable and unfailingly generous soul" Scotsman "A searingly honest, beautiful book" — Kate Mosse Daily Telegraph "One of the most devastatingly moving memoirs I've ever read…a work of beauty and truth " Independent "Miraculous" — Hilary Spurling Guardian