Ian Sansom is back with another antidote to the festive season with this brilliant collection of short stories filled with those same emotions we feel year upon year in the most trying and joyous of months - anticipation, frustration, despair and ecstasy. In these stories, Sansom's vivid and varying characters peel back the many layers of the winter month, from a lonely mother to a guardian angel, a pest-controller to a bar-bar-bar owning brother to a baker selling lockdown sourdough kits, these snippets of lives are revealing and beautifully familiar.