Winter's tales

Near the end of "The Frozen Thames," a family shelters two robins to protect them from the killing cold that gripped London in the winter of 1880. When the story opens, one of the family's children is watching a robin perched on her bedpost, and he cocks his head and looks back at her.

"Somewhere downstairs the other robin is singing," author Helen Humphreys writes. "All over London, the girl thinks, all over London this very same thing is happening. Each house is a dark lantern, and each one holds the lit flicker of bird within its ribs."

This anecdote is one of the few heartwarming tales in "The Frozen Thames," Humphreys' collection of fictional vignettes for each of the 40 times that the river Thames froze solid between 1142 and 1895. Although the stories are fiction, most are based on historical accounts.

Humphreys packs her book with striking imagery: A traveler walking beside the frozen river encounters a massive ship, locked into the ice. A miller's son finds a flock of frozen birds, takes them into his hands and warms most of them back to life. King Henry VIII rides across the icy highway while plotting to rid himself of his second wife, Anne Boleyn.

The author also introduces us to a dizzying array of characters — kings, queens, poets and ordinary folk — each coping with the bleak midwinter. But Humphreys' stories are so short that even the most vivid character — Bess, the reluctant poet rhyming about the ice — appears before our eyes only briefly before she's gone.

"The Frozen Thames" is a highly original book, combining spare tales of loss with flashes of beauty and dark humor. But in the end, its dazzle chills the heart instead of warming it.