Is it just us, or is this winter completely bananas? No one has any idea what to expect — in New York City, people were sitting outside in and slipping on ice the next; California pretty much ; and in North Carolina, . At this rate, it’s anyone’s guess whether you want to escape winter or embrace it. So we curated ten listens that do both: five to surround you in dark and snowy cold, and five to evoke all the sunshine and sweat you may be yearning for … or getting, if you’re in . (Like we said: bananas.)
Sunscape
This 2013 Audie Award-nominated novel begins in 1962 on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, when a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. What follows is a sweeping, shimmering ride that spans the globe and time.
Snowscape
The best-selling personal account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of Into the Wild. Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer's frank eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.
Sunscape
In this beloved and best-selling series, Mma "Precious" Ramotswe has set up a detective agency in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, making her the only female detective in the country. At first, cases are hard to come by. But eventually, troubled people come to Precious with a variety of concerns. Potentially philandering husbands, seemingly schizophrenic doctors, and a missing boy who may have been killed by witch doctors all compel Precious to roam about in her tiny van, searching for clues. You can start anywhere, but this one seemed especially fitting right now...
Snowscape
This winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature follows an exiled Turkish poet, Ka, as he is led to a remote town near the Russian border, drawn both by a mysterious epidemic of suicides and the radiant childhood friend he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, Westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration.
Sunscape
Audible's romance fans have been upvoting this self-published series, narrated expertly by Claire Bocking. In book one, an American woman takes a much-needed three-week vacation (already your ears are perking up) to New Zealand, which is described so well in this book, it's like an immersive travel show. With sexy rugby players.
Snowscape
The gorgeous, image-rich story of the doomed love affair of a wealthy sophisticate, Shimamura, and the geisha Komako, at a mountain hot spring resort in western Japan — one of the snowiest regions on earth.
Sunscape
In E.M. Forster's classic, Dr. Aziz is a young Muslim physician in the British Indian town of Chandrapore. One evening he comes across an English woman, Mrs. Moore, in the courtyard of a local mosque; she and her younger traveling companion Adela are disappointed by claustrophobic British colonial culture and wish to see something of the 'real' India. But when Aziz kindly offers to take them on a tour of the Marabar caves with his close friend Cyril Fielding, the trip results in a shocking accusation that throws Chandrapore into a fever of racial tension.
Snowscape
In book one of this thrilling crime series, a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park. Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation, but she is in a danger of her own.
Sunscape
In one of Barbara Kingsolver's most well-loved novels, Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist, takes his family and mission to the sweltering Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil.
Snowscape
If you haven't already listened to the thrilling, Simon Vance-narrated, Swedish-set Millennium Series, what are you waiting for ... Summer? Who knows what that will even be like.