Book description
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. 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 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.
