Winter Journey Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Winter Journey Book

Isabel Colegate has a unique gift for shining the bright light of passing history onto seemingly quiet rural lives, as she beautifully proved in her novel The Shooting Party. In Winter Journey, middle-aged siblings Edith and Alfred encounter each other over a long, chilly visit at the family home. The two are, by any worldly standard, glamorous successes. Born to a crotchety but well-known composer, each child found a career path that reflected the spirit of the 1970s. Edith built a grassroots playgroup movement into an independent party that eventually got her elected to Parliament. Alfred, a photographer, consorted with his lovely but mad model, Lydia, and hosted gentle parties of hippies at the family pile. Now, though they've achieved the laurels of middle age, neither is at peace. Over the course of their visit, Edith and Alfred are forced, simply by proximity, to recall memories they'd simply rather forget. This could be a dull formula for a novel, since there's very little action propelling it into the future, yet Colegate masterfully teases this quiet material into suspense. For starters, she's not above blunt seduction of the reader. Edith, for instance, observes her brother at the beginning of the book: "There he was, in his tattered old coat, without his gloves, needing a shave, nothing to be proud of, and yet she was proud of him; she always had been. If only that wretched woman had not done that awful thing." It takes a confident writer to shill her material so baldly. Colegate writes more subtly about the frightening regrets of middle age, the way one moment a life can seem well spent and the next merely squandered. As Edith writes to a friend: "It is extraordinary how whole pockets of feeling can be stored away, forgotten for years, and then quite unexpectedly emerge in all their pristine fervour, time having wrought no modification at all." Brother and sister both suffer in these "pockets of feeling." It's Colegate's larger achievement to link their lives to the larger passage of English history. --Claire DedererRead More

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  • Product Description

    From the best-selling author of The Shooting Party, a contemporary tale of sibling rivalry and reconciliation, and of the hopes and discoveries of mature middle age His wild years at last 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 older sister, Edith, a former Member of Parliament and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her Alfred's bachelor life is undesirable, his appearance careless, his current work-a series of manipulated images of his late lover, Lydia-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. Published in the UK to great acclaim, Winter Journey is Isabel Colegate's first new book to appear in America in nearly a decade. The London Times called it "a sonorous, muted masterpiece," a book whose intelligence shines through the page like the bright winter sun, illuminating these characters and the turbulent histories that have shaped them. "I suppose you might say it's a novel about Britain," said the Financial Times. "On a simpler level it's about a brother and a sister, and it reads true."

  • 1582431221
  • 9781582431222
  • Isabel Colegate
  • 11 December 2000
  • Counterpoint Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 220
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