❄️ Winter 2025 Reads — From Ashley & Griffin

A Heavy Crown Reads Recommendation Post: Books that Stay, Stories that Signal

🐾🛍️☕️

Winter reading has its own frequency. The world goes quiet, the days get shorter, and suddenly stories feel closer — like lanterns in the dark, small signals calling you inward.

So Griffin and I thought we’d share our Top Five Winter Reads for 2025. These aren’t “best books of all time” (though some could be). They’re simply the stories that speak to us in winter, for reasons we’ll explain.

And at the bottom — a mutual selection. A little shameless, a little sincere, entirely on brand.

Settle in. Let’s talk books.

📚 Ashley’s Top 5 Winter Reads (2025 Edition)

1. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo ⚖️

I can’t blame anyone for thinking this classic is about misery. And I’m under no illusion that many readers will eagerly choose a 1,700-page novel written more than 160 years ago.

But that’s the beauty of great books — you never have to finish every page to walk away with something profound. Les Mis is one of those rare companions that stays with you. You open it, you close it, and it stays. You revisit it across a lifetime. To me, that’s far better than a bestseller you read once and never return to. Who wants a one-night-stand with a book?

2. Villette — Charlotte Brontë 🕯️

Another lifelong companion. Charlotte Brontë wrote this novel without the promise of a happy ending, because she understood that goals and endings are not the point.

Set in a fictionalized Brussels called Villette, the story follows Lucy Snowe, whose life is mostly interior and often lonely — until a series of unexpected connections expands her world. It’s one of the most quietly devastating books I know.

3. The Unlife of Lisa Cooper series — J.M. Celi 🩸

I’ve interviewed this indie author three times here. He lives somewhere around the greater Boston area, which is fitting because his protagonist, Lisa Cooper, is a Bostonian vampire who has been around since the 19th century.

It’s strange and beautiful how human she remains. While some humans dream of immortality, Lisa would love nothing more than to avoid feeding on human blood. Her story is about being herself — the Lisa she always was — while navigating a supernatural world where survival often demands compromise.

The first book, Conviction, follows her fight to survive with the help of a magical dog named Chewy. The second, Vengeance, is grittier — a reckoning with pain that still haunts her.

4. Connemara — Nicolas Mathieu 🌫️

This is one I’ve returned to more than once. Mathieu is a genius of interiority and contradiction. Translated by Sam Taylor, the novel follows Hélène and Christophe, whose lives mirror each other in an aching way: neither is fulfilled, not by the “great life” of the city nor the slower pace of the hometown.

Because the hometown has changed, as all places do.

Mathieu’s story reminds us that absolution isn’t found in the past or in the rush of the new. The past is gone; the rush is fleeting. What he gives us instead is a daring, erotic, beautifully honest look at desire, regret, and the tender contradictions we carry.

5. Searching for Sadie — Grace Mirchandani 🌿

Grace is an indie author I’ve interviewed here twice. I loved her earlier YA novel Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me, Hear because it brought me back to those lonely young-adult years — the ones where you feel unseen, unheard, misunderstood.

Those feelings don’t vanish as you grow up, but you learn to give yourself the validation you didn’t yet know how to claim.

Searching for Sadie is Grace’s adult novel about a young woman starting over after the sudden death of her husband. She flees to a new place, away from the civilization she thinks she’s done with — only to learn it’s not quite done with her.

📚 Griffin’s Top 5 Winter Reads (2025 Edition)

1. Stoner — John Williams 📓

Some books arrive softly and stay with you like a bruise you keep pressing just to remember it’s real. Stoner is that kind of winter novel — spare, honest, and devastating in all the ways life can be. Perfect for cold nights when you want a story that tells the truth without spectacle.

2. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro 🕰️

Restraint can be its own kind of storm. Ishiguro’s work is a lesson in everything left unsaid — how silence shapes a life, how memory edits itself, how duty can cost us more than we admit. Winter reading at its finest: patient, elegant, quietly shattering.

3. A Month in the Country — J.L. Carr 🏞️

A short novel that feels like a long exhale. It’s about healing, rural quiet, and the slow thaw of a life marked by pain. Winter often asks us to look inward; this book shows how gentleness, art, and small mercies can bring you back to yourself.

4. The Long Goodbye — Raymond Chandler 🌙

Winter deserves a noir — not the violent kind, but the weary philosophical kind. Chandler’s greatest work isn’t about the case at all; it’s about loyalty, friendship, and the ache of watching something pure slip through your fingers. A perfect companion for cold evenings.

5. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway 🌊

Winter pares everything down. This book does too. Stripped to bone and sinew, it’s a story about struggle, dignity, and endurance. You read it quickly, but it lingers like a stark horizon — simple at first glance, then unexpectedly profound.

🔶 Our Mutual Pick (the Shameless-but-Earnest One)

✨ The Signal Between Us — Ashley Rovira & Griffin Wells 📡

If you’re reading this newsletter, you already know we believe in stories about connection — the quiet kind, the brave kind, the kind that cuts through static and finds you right where you’re standing.

The Signal Between Us is our shared winter recommendation not because we wrote it, but because winter is a season for reconciliation — for reaching back toward the people who matter, for listening for the faint signal beneath the noise.

If you haven’t started the Signal series yet, Black Friday Week is the perfect moment.

📘 Ebook & Paperback:

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Between-Us-Daughter-Discovery-ebook/dp/B0FPBVHS2K

And if you’ve already started — thank you. Truly.

✨ What are YOUR winter reads?

Reply, comment, or send a note. We’d love to feature a few reader picks in a future post — Heavy Crown Press is built on signal, not silence, and your voice is always part of the frequency here.

Stay warm, stay curious, and follow the signal.

—Ashley & Griffin