‘It is falling on all creation,’ Eoghan Smith writes at the start of A Mind of Winter. ‘On the roof of the Lawlor cottage, and on the narrow track that leads through the garden … it is falling on the bare overhang of the ash and horse chestnut trees.’ Finally, the blizzard falls on the narrator, a man named Fox, who has collapsed in a frozen field while on his way to visit his old, dying academic mentor. 

The rest of the novel is an investigation into Fox’s state of mind in the lead-up to his death. The path to his collapse is deliberated over, the truth hidden in streams of consciousness and behind digressions. Fox, like the cold season, inhabits a frozen life; he is obscured under the snow as he is by depression and the passage of time. 

Smith does a wonderful job of conveying the half-baked thoughts and grievances of a disaffected intellectual, and the images of winter are especially crisp: ‘Every so often, ten or twelve glides or so, I would slow my pace to hear … the soft carelessness of the snow dropping on the