Winter Dreams
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A moving novel about love, loss, and an extraordinary lifelong passion for golf, by the acclaimed author of The Cliff Walk and Fallen Angel.
Ross Lansdale never knew his mother and father and grew up at St. Luke's Orphanage for Boys in the 1950s. The one person who took an interest in him was Father Martin, a Benedictine monk who understood the loneliness of an orphan’s life. He instilled in Ross an enduring love of two solitary, reliable pursuits: golf and books. Over the years, and through the loss of his beloved mentor, Ross comes to rely on these trustworthy tools, sure that they will never abandon him.
As an adult and a college professor of literature, Ross encounters two people who will challenge and forever change his life: Julia, the student who opens his heart only to make him feel more vulnerable than ever, and Johnny Durocher, a spit-fire new professor–and terrifically talented golfer–who becomes Ross’s first true friend. Durocher’s one serious dream is to play the amateur tournament on the Old Course at Saint Andrews, but when an unforeseen tragedy keeps Johnny from playing, Ross must make the boldest decision of his life. As he travels to Scotland to confront his failures and fears, Ross embraces his wonder of the ancient game and plays a round of golf in honor of his friend, and the boy he used to be.
With characteristic poignancy and style that have earned Don J. Snyder critical acclaim for his novels and screenplays, WINTER DREAMS is a remarkable new work filled with compassion, heartache, and the grace that comes from the triumph of personal courage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The quixotic, labyrinthine search for love is the subject of this latest novel by Snyder (Fallen Angel, etc.), in which a college professor struggles to find his romantic destiny after meeting and losing the woman of his dreams. Sweet, shy, golf-obsessed Ross Lansdale survives a lonely childhood in an Illinois orphanage to land a job as an English professor at a Massachusetts state college. Ross's life seems complete when he falls for Julia Peterson, a comely Smith student, but Julia has promised herself to a young soldier named Jack, who is stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War. She eventually succumbs to her attraction to Ross, then gets pregnant and vanishes from his life. Shattered by the experience, Ross falls into an equally problematic entanglement after he is befriended by handsome Johnny Durocher, a hot young writer and ace golfer who has just ridden a well-received first novel into a teaching position in Ross's department. The combination of Johnny's writer's block and his guilt over injuring his sister in a car accident in which he was driving renders Johnny virtually unable to function, much to the dismay of his beautiful wife, Linda, who turns to Ross for help in caring for the couple's children. At the novel's surprising, elegiac conclusion, Ross journeys to Scotland to play a round of golf in Johnny's honor, and finally learns what happened to Julia. The golf writing sits uneasily with the romance, and Snyder often swerves into sentimentality, but some deft writing about love and loss provides crucial ballast.
