What Winter Means

Book excerpt: Winner, Grassic Short Novel Prize 2016 What Winter Means, Deena Linett's third novel, brings five women of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities together who have won prestigious fellowships to a fictive library outside Boston. As these very different women move through time and experience, each brings her complex history to surprising events in the present. With her marvelously supple prose, and fluid, almost musical structure, Linett's richly layered descriptions of her characters give this short novel an impressive spaciousness. —K.C. Frederick, winner of the PEN/Winship Prize and five other novels A New York painter who was born in South Africa, a proper Protestant New Englander involved with a married man, a Hawaiian philosopher, a Breton architectural historian, and a Florida novelist whose son has committed a rape have won fellowships and gather to do their work at a library outside Boston. We follow the women of What Winter Means as they struggle with their work, men, children and aging. It is as if we overhear women we know, thinking, and talking to one another over a cup of tea. —Barbara Bergmann, Editor, Evening Street Press What Winter Means presents the lives of five women, scholars and artists, their vocations, loves, and friendships, with insight and sympathy in a series of rich, compassionate stories—Rose Moss, author of In Court (also in Spanish) and four other books.