The Dakota Winters

An evocative novel about a New York City family living in the famed Dakota apartment building in the year leading up to John Lennon's assassination.

"Arresting. . . . [A] sad and funny tale. . . . Barbash has sprinkled The Dakota Winters with Beatle dust. Lennon is alive in its pages." —New York Times Book Review

It's the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton's father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy's stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.


But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father's professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.

"Deft, funny, touching, and sharply observed, a marvel of tone, and a skillful evocation of a dark passage in the history of New York City, when all the fearful ironies of the world we live in now first came stalking into view." —Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

"If you were a fan of TV's Mad Men—specific to a time and place but universal in its exploration of the themes of identity and human vulnerability—you might very well love this novel as much as I did." —Wally Lamb, New York Times–bestselling author of I Know This Much Is True