Oprah picks Mary Lawson’s Solace in Winter for her book club

Oprah Winfrey has chosen Mary Lawson’s Solace in Winter as her latest book-club selection. The announcement came on Tuesday, 10 November, the day the novel was released. It is the 126th pick in Oprah’s Book Club, according to Oprah Daily, and gives readers a timely new title to share as winter approaches.

The novel is set in a snowbound Canadian town in 1969. Its central character, Jack, is a widower who encounters an injured dog and a young man fleeing the Vietnam draft on the same stretch of road. He offers them refuge, and his home gradually becomes a place where different lives intersect. This is a description of the fiction, not a real-life account. Oprah described the book as moving and suitable for a family discussion, a judgment readers can test for themselves.

Lawson, now 80, is a Canadian writer whose earlier novels include Crow Lake, The Other Side of the Bridge, Road Ends and A Town Called Solace. Her work repeatedly returns to northern Ontario, the landscape she knew from childhood summers. Solace in Winter is a stand-alone novel but takes place in the literary world she has developed across those books.

The selection arrived with a small comic human moment. Lawson told Oprah Daily she initially thought Winfrey’s phone call was a scam and almost hung up. The two later appeared together on CBS Mornings to announce the pick. A conversation with Lawson is also available through Oprah’s podcast, offering readers a way to hear the author discuss her work before or after reading.

For Beaux readers, the appeal is not simply a celebrity endorsement. The pick introduces a living writer whose career began later than many assume a novelist’s can: Lawson’s first novel appeared when she was 55. Her new story, centered on shelter and unexpected connection, offers a concrete starting point for a winter book-club conversation.