There’s something almost universally appealing to readers about having a comfy chair near a window with a cozy blanket, in a quiet room with a good book.

If you can picture yourself there, I want to suggest a title for the book you’re holding in your hands. So much the better if it’s a rapidly darkening November afternoon, with the window open and a cool, damp breeze flowing in.

Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon A River drops us into Victorian England near a riverside tavern. The storytelling is sublime. There’s just enough descriptive language, in the casual tone of the oral storyteller. You’re there with the narrator, looking down at the scene and feeling, smelling, and seeing everything as she tells you about it.

The characters are both mysterious and sympathetic. The moody, atmospheric descriptions can be an escape or temporarily transport you to a safe place to deal with your feelings.

For a girl who grew up on a river (in my case, the Susquehanna), the story could well have taken place in the distant past of the town where I grew up or another place like it.

The book takes one trip around the sun, starting and ending at this time of year. The seasonal cycles of nature figure prominently in the tale, whether it’s the rhythms of the river, the cycle of the moon, or the people who necessarily have to adjust to different river levels and weather throughout the year.

The narrator didn’t pretend to know anything more than another person alive at the time the book took place, or even beyond the point in the story that had been told so far. There wasn’t a jarring moment where I was wondering, would someone back then have said/done/worn that? Or worse, what does the narrator know that they aren’t saying?

Now is a time of year when we hunker down and try to decide what to do about the dark. Perhaps this book will help you find the answer to how you’ll spend your own dark months this year.

“As is well-known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch black night. It is a time of magic.”

-Diane Setterfield, Once Upon A River