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Anne Michaels
Winter Vault
Paperback € 17,95
Hardcover € 24,95
Publisher:
McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 978-0-7710-5890-5
Anne Michaels’s first work of
fiction in more than a decade, The
Winter Vault is a stunning, richly
layered, and timeless novel that is
everything we could hope for for
Michaels’s second novel — and more.
Set in Canada and Egypt, and with
flashbacks to England and Poland
after the war, The Winter Vault is a
spellbinding love story that
juxtaposes momentous historical
events with the most intimate
moments of individual lives.
In 1964, a newly married Canadian
couple settle into a houseboat on
the Nile just below Abu Simbel. At
the time of the building of the
Aswam dam, Avery Escher is one of
the engineers responsible for the
dismantling and reconstruction of a
sacred temple, a
“machine-worshipper” who is
nonetheless sensitive to their
destructive power. Jean is a
botanist by avocation, passionately
interested in everything that grows.
They met on the banks of the St.
Lawrence River, witnessing the
construction of the Seaway as it
swallowed towns, homes, and lives.
Now, at the edge of another world
about to be inundated in the name of
progress, much of what they most
believe in is tested.
When a tragic event occurs, nearing
the end of Avery’s time in Egypt, he
and Jean return to separate lives in
Toronto; Avery to school to study
architecture and Jean into the orbit
of Lucjan, a Polish émigré artist
whose haunting tales of occupied
Warsaw pull her further from her
husband, while offering her the
chance to assume her most essential
life.
Breathtaking, vivid in its
exploration of both the physical and
emotional worlds of its characters,
intensely moving and lyrical, The
Winter Vault is a radiant work of
fiction and contains all the
elements for which Anne Michaels is
celebrated.
From the Jacket
“Profound loss, desolation and
rebuilding are the literal and
metaphoric themes of Michaels’s
exquisite second novel (after
Fugitive Pieces)…. A tender love
story set against an intriguing bit
of history is handled with uncommon
skill.”
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Abu Simbel
Aswam
dam
St.
Lawrence River
Seaway
Toronto
occupied
Warsaw
Michaels' debut,
Fugitive Pieces,
€ 14,95, was awarded The
Orange Prize and the Guardian
Fiction Award.
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