Winter Journey
Isabel Colegate
Book Description
A fierce, funny, unsentimental book about growing older, about grace and forgiveness, and about hope for a world we must too soon leave behind.
His wild years behind him, Alfred Ashby, a celebrated photographer now in his late fifties, has returned to where he was raised:, the family farm in rural England. The old house in the valley, little changed by the years, provides him an agreeable darkroom, necessary solitude, and a link to a more tranquil past.
His reverie is broken by a January visit from his headstrong older sister, Edith, a former MP and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her, Alfred’s bachelor life is undesirable, his work obsessive and disturbing. She has plans for Alfred, for the farm and for the future, plans she hopes will help the two of them mend their frayed relationship and forget their past sorrows, past mistakes. In the course of their long winter visit, this infinitely complicated brother and sister confront their deepest selves and retrace the tangled paths their lives have taken.
Praise For This Book
"Astonishing . . . Its chief pleasures are its sneaky humor and the frank delight of the author in her characters." —The New York Times Book Review"An ambivalent elegy to a lost England of recent memory. Deceptively domestic in scale, the novel is as densely textured and mellow as a cello sonata fading on the evevning air." —The Boston Globe
"A quiet, intense, deeply imagined book about the discoveries of late middle age. I suppose you might say it is a novel about England. At a simpler level, it is about a brother and a sister, and it reads true." —Financial Times
"As a novelist of English manners, Isabel Colegate has no rival." —The Times (London)
