Italo Calvino’s postmodernist novel is a masterfully crafted puzzle. It begins with you, the reader, trying to read a book called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. What follows are 22 chapters, with every odd chapter being about you, the reader. It begins: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room…“

One of Edith Wharton’s greatest works is Ethan Frome, about a poor farmer (Ethan Frome) living in New England with his wife, Zeena. When they hire Zeena’s cousin, Mattie, he finds himself falling for her. This cover illustration evokes the winter vibe of the novel, where Ethan has been “in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away,” and winter is much of the setting for the story.

Read more: A Guide to all of Edith Wharton’s Novels and Novellas

One of the more recent books on this list, Disappearing Earth is set in the far-flung Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, where two young sisters go missing. The book unfolds through different POVs of Kamchatka residents over the year-long search for the sisters, and it’s a mesmerizing, thrilling story of violence in a remote region.

In an isolated mountain onsen (hot spring) town in Japan, Shimamura, a wealthy Tokyo dilettante, meets Komako, a lowly geisha. Their doomed love affair plays out over the story. When author Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize, it was one of the three novels cited.

In 1920 Alaska, recent arrivals Jack and Mabel arrive to create a homestead. During the first snowfall of the season, they make a child out of snow—the next morning, their creation is gone, but a blonde-haired girl named Faina appears in the woods. Author Eowyn Ivey was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this book.

The Chronicles of Narnia are a classic of children’s literature for a reason, but particularly fitting for our winter books reading list is the first book published in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Narnia is stuck in frozen eternal winter and four children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy set out to save the land.

If you’re looking for a winter literature classic, your best bet will typically be Russian literature—including the great Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. There are beautiful descriptions of winter in the book, including when Anna is on the train back to St. Petersburg. “At first she was unable to read. To begin with, she was bothered by the bustle and movement; then, when the train started moving, she could not help listening to the noises; then the snow that beat against the left-hand window and stuck to the glass, and the sight of a conductor passing by, all bundled up and covered with snow on one side, and the talk about the terrible blizzard outside, distracted her attention…”

In 1954 on San Piedro Island, a (fictional) isolated location north of Puget Sound, Carl, a local fisherman, is found drowned and Kabuo, a Japanese American war veteran, is charged with his murder. The trial is held in December, during a snowstorm, and it unearths the town’s anti-Japanese sentiments from World War II, and it’s told through the lens of the trial and flashbacks to wartime.

The second novel in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is set in winter. As the publisher writes, “When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone? Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.”

Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining is a definitive winter read, as it is set during wintertime when Jack takes a winter caretaker position at the remote Overlook Hotelin the Rocky Mountains.

Another Russian winter classic is Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, about the titular Zivago who has his family leave Moscow during the Russian Revolution.

In this post-apocalyptic novel, winter is coming in a small Anishinaabe community in northern Canada, but when the reserve loses power and is cut out from the outside world, they must figure out how to survive.

Agatha Christie’s best winter tales are on this list—but no list of winter classics would be complete without one of her best-known works, Murder on the Orient Express, where the famous Orient Express is stopped by a snowstorm and a murder of a millionaire takes place. Detective Hercule Poirot then sets out to find the killer aboard the train.

During a snowstorm in Brooklyn, Richard, a university professor accidentally hits Evelyn’s car, who is undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. This small event soon turns into a larger story, with Evelyn showing up at Richard’s home seeking help, and he ropes in his tenant, Lucia, an academic from Chile, to assist and the three end up on a road trip.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning feminist science fiction novel is about the icebound planet of Winter, “a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid.”Genly, a human ambassador, is sent there, to facilitate the planet’s inclusion in an intergalactic civilization.

John le Carré’s famous spy thriller isn’t explicitly a winter book, but the title definitely evokes wintertime, so we’re counting it. The story follows British agent Alec Lemas who is sent to East Germany as a faux defector.

This 1947 novel by Philip Larkin follows the story of Katherine, a library assistant, living in exile in a small English town in the early 1940s.

Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations is the story of Franny Stone, an Irish-Australian woman who wants to track the last flight of the Arctic terns — birds who migrate from the North Pole to Antarctica. She ends up on a fishing ship led by an eccentric captain, Ennis, and they follow the birds south.