What to Look for in Winter [Hardcover]

'the author folds in on herself in tight, dense, intricate coils, then unfolds herself again with miraculous lightness and delicacy.'
--Guardian

McWilliam writes with elegance, with sardonic humour and with honesty. --The Sunday Times

What a precise and poetic dissection of a life this is; how brave she was, and how wise, to undertake it. --The Telegraph

...the most startling, discomforting, complicated, ungovernable, hilarious and heart-rending of memoirs.
-- The Telegraph

'So begins 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... the work of a vulnerable, unfailingly generous soul.' --The Scotsman

A 'never-less-than-enticing chronicle of a troubled life' -- The Herald

`A rare thing: a misery memoir that, while touching the far reaches of pain, leaves one feeling enriched, not dirty'
-- Financial Times

'It is an extremely sagacious book about loss' --The Observer

'This is a moving, uplifting, shocking and compellingly strange book...a powerful work of art' --Scotland on Sunday

'A fine, challenging autobiography...That she survived to write a book as good as this is nothing short of miraculous.'
--Daily Mail

`What to Look for in Winter...is an extremely sagacious book about loss' --The Observer

`This is a moving, uplifting, shocking and compellingly strange book.' --Scotland on Sunday

`...a...challenging autobiography that reminds you that misfortune is always beating against the window, attracted by the light of happiness' --Daily Mail

`One of the most devastatingly moving memoirs I've ever read...a work of beauty and truth' -- Independent

`...beautiful, harrowing and in every way remarkable.' -- New Statesman

'A book that, for all the brilliance of its author, doesn't seem completely aware of everything it has revealed.' -- Guardian

'...wonderful yet disturbing book... -- The Critics

"gripping and unexpected... this remarkable memoir, `a baton in the dark', which McWilliam bravely passes to the reader." --Literary Review

"Her long book yields an unmistakable human being, and is seldom disheartening, woes and all." --TLS

It's been too long since Candia McWilliam's last book... She has lost none of her grace of expression and freshness of thought. A remarkable and brave book. --The Observer

` Candia McWilliams has won this year's South Bank Sky Arts Awards literature prize with her What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness, published by Jonathan Cape.' --The Bookseller writes,

'It's as if we're reading her thoughts unedited, which makes the many rhythmic, arresting passages all the more impressive. McWilliam doesn't hold back: she makes us feel how frightening it is inside her head. There's no sickly heroism. Resentful, muddles, undignified, unmoored, she is captivating'
--London Review of Books

`The most brutally honest and beautifully written account I have read of somebody's own failings and suffering' --Daily Mail

`What makes her memoir impressive isn't the story she has to tell - rich in drama though it is - but her artistry as a writer' --Independent

`magnificent memoir. Moving from her childhood in Edinburgh to the experimental surgery that restored her sight, the book is a triumph.'
--I

`An endlessly rewarding account'. --The Herald Arts Review

`McWilliam is such a good writer, this is an important and useful book'. --The Guardian

A beautifully written, moving and extraordinary work of autobiography from one of the leading figures of the British literary world.

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 like an assault especially tailored for someone whose life consisted of reading and writing. The necessity to look inwards that followed took her on an even more painful personal journey through a waste of snows punctuated by shards of ice as she attempted to write her life back into human shape.

At first she could only dictate, and the unfamiliar process unblocked a flow of memory and association concerning her childhood in Edinburgh, her mother's suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, finding and losing bearings in Cambridge and London, her marriages, her children and, stalking all these, her increasing alcoholism. In What To Look For In Winter, we see her rifling through her many selves for that elusive thing, a sense of self, as all the time she searches the wilder shores of medicine for a cure for her blindness.

This is a writer's book, fascinated by the process and wellsprings of writing. While love and loss are at its centre, it also celebrates friendship, reading, love of children and the consolations of landscape, particularly that of Colonsay, the Hebridean island where, after three years in the dark, and thanks to an unexpected message from a wise and sympathetic reader, she begins to face up to how, falteringly, she might come to see once

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 like an assault especially tailored for someone whose life consisted of reading and writing. The necessity to look inwards that followed took her on an even more painful personal journey through a waste of snows punctuated by shards of ice as she attempted to write her life back into human shape.

At first she could only dictate, and the unfamiliar process unblocked a flow of memory and association concerning her childhood in Edinburgh, her mother's suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, finding and losing bearings in Cambridge and London, her marriages, her children and, stalking all these, her increasing alcoholism.

In What To Look For In Winter, we see her rifling through her many selves for that elusive thing, a sense of self, as all the time she searches the wilder shores of medicine for a cure for her blindness.

This is a writer's book, fascinated by the process and wellsprings of writing. While love and loss are at its centre, it also celebrates friendship, reading, love of children and the consolations of landscape, particularly that of Colonsay, the Hebridean island where, after three years in the dark, and thanks to an unexpected message from a wise and sympathetic reader, she begins to face up to how, falteringly, she might come to see once more.

Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988) which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Debatable Land (1994) which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and its Italian translation won the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories, Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent an operation which harvested tendons from her leg in order to enable her to open her eyelids.