In this short fable of midwinter, Susanna Clarke tells of the speech of dogs and pigs and foxes and the woods themselves, who talk to those who know how to listen. It’s a kind of inverted Christmas tale, one in which the space between human and beast is either absent or else traversed at will. But I found the afterword as interesting as the story: in it, Clarke describes how the story came to be, and notes that most stories are retellings of long forgotten tales. Snatches of song and phrase bury themselves deep in memory only to send their shoots back up to the surface when we least expect them—when, if we’re lucky and persistent, we can catch them and send them back out into the world anew.