Winterwood
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The San Francisco Chronicle declared him "one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland," and Neil Jordan called Winterwood "the most terrifying book I've ever read." In this chilling and unforgettable novel, Patrick McCabe shows us that nothing-and no one-is ever quite what they seem. Shortlisted for the Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year, Winterwood is a disturbing tale of love, death, and identity from a masterful novelist whose "books are skillful exercises in the macabre and the horrific. It is as though Stephen King had learned how to write" (New York Review of Books).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freelance writer Redmond Hatch loves his young wife, Catherine he is 40 and she is 22 when they wed in 1981 and adores his infant daughter, Imogen, but in Irish author McCabe's eighth novel (his prior work included Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Redmond's happy slice of the world cruelly crumbles. A few years into wedded bliss, Redmond's wife cuckolds and then divorces him; he feigns suicide, assumes a false identity and disappears into a sad-sack life that spirals sharply downward after he reads a newspaper account of the suicide of convicted child murderer (and creepy acquaintance) Ned Strange: Redmond's suddenly haunted by nightmares and hallucinations in which Ned molests him. He stalks his former family and, in 1991, kidnaps and kills his estranged daughter, burying her in the isolated countryside their imaginary "winterwood" and visiting her grave over the next decade. Redmond, however, has yet to bottom out. Despite a fractured, hard-to-follow chronology, this tale about a man's descent into madness is both artfully repellent and hypnotically compelling.
