Christopher Nicholson’s ‘moving, gripping and illuminating’ novel WINTER is out now in the US from Europa Editions. Having received fantastic reviews in the UK and France, the novel is now charming readers across the Atlantic.
John Boyne called it ‘a superb novel, beautifully written, very moving’ and David Lodge wrote that ‘WINTER is a wonderful novel, moving, gripping, and illuminating. Keeping closely to the known facts about the triangular relationship between the elderly Thomas Hardy, his second wife Florence, and the beautiful young butcher’s wife and amateur actress, Gertrude, Nicholson has used the resources of fiction to represent their emotional lives with intensity and depth.’
Pre-publication, Publisher’s Weekly gave it a Starred Review: ‘As in his two previous novels, Nicholson (THE ELEPHANT KEEPER) presents an impossible, inappropriate passion. This effort proves most remarkable for its deliciously archaic prose and portrait of the artist as an old man falling in love partly with a girl, partly with the disappearing countryside and the lost youth she represents, and mostly with his own creation.’
This week Carmela Ciuraru of The New York Times called it ‘ an elegiac, beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on ageing, marriage and loss’ and Patricia Hagen wrote as follows in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: ‘A lovely, understated novel, which evokes the best of Hardy’s own prose with nary a whiff of pastiche…Nicholson tells the story from the perspectives of all three characters – Hardy, Florence and Gertie. All three are portrayed unsentimentally, though with empathy and understanding; Florence’s narrative is especially fine…WINTER is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out the most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. It never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness.’
In the UK The Times called it ‘pitch perfect…it is brave to set yourself up for comparison with an author as great as Hardy but this poetic and unashamedly literary book is good enough not to be embarrassed by the company it seeks to keep.’ Jane Shilling of The Sunday Telegraph wrote that ‘a gently elegiac tone permeates the novel, with its ravishing, appropriately Hardyesque sense of the intimate connection between landscape and emotion.’
La Table Ronde published L’HIVER in France, and BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation, TESS IN WINTER, dramatized by Sara Davies, in December 2015. Theatrical rights are also sold.
Christopher Nicholson lives in the countryside on the border between Wiltshire and Dorset. WINTER is his third novel. His second novel THE ELEPHANT KEEPER (Fourth Estate) was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Encore Award.
See more on Christopher Nicholson's website.
