Top 10 books about the seasons

A writer who has swapped city life for sheep farming chooses reading attuned to the year’s cycles, from Rachel Cusk to Marcel Proust

My book On Sheep: Diary of a Swedish Shepherd is a memoir about my move away from an urban life as a literary academic to work on a remote rural sheep farm. Suddenly, the seasons became much more than dull weather reports on the radio or the cause for delays in my commute. When I became a novice shepherd, the seasons transformed into acute physical sensations; cold, heat, snow, rain and wind that could chill me to the bone. For the sheep, the seasons govern their entire existence – their life goes from nibbling on winter feed, to the lambing in the spring, to grazing on the vast summer pastures and finally ends with the autumn slaughter.

In many ways, my lifestyle change has resulted in a clash between a reflective, philosophical mind and a practical, weather-dependent reality. However, I still like to read books and what I have come to realise is that my reading experience is closely intertwined with my physical reality. Here are 10 books – fiction and non-fiction – that are my ode to the seasons.