Monday 18 July 2022

The Winter Wives by Linden MacIntyre

The Winter Wives by Canadian author, Linden MacIntyre has been on my list to read for awhile. This week I finally got around to reading it.

Two old friends, who first met in university, get together for a weekend of golfing: Allan, a football hero, worldly and financially successful, and his quieter friend, nicknamed Byron, lame from a childhood injury, a smart fellow who became a lawyer but who has never left home, staying put so he could care for a mother with Alzheimer's. 

During a long night of drinking, the fault lines between them start to show. One of the biggest: the two men married sisters, though Allan was the one who walked down the aisle with Peggy, the sister both of them loved, and Byron had to settle for Annie. 

Out on the course the next morning, Allan suffers a stroke. In one traumatic moment, he loses control of his life, his wife and his business empire, which turns out to have been built on lies and the illegal drug trade. And Byron has to suddenly confront his own weaknesses and strengths, his tangled relationship with Allan and the Winter sisters--both the one he married and the one he thought was the love of his life. No one will anticipate the lengths to which Byron will go to make sense of his life.

It's a story which kept me reading. The Winter Wives was on the Canadian top 10 list for weeks and months. I can see why.

About Linden MacIntyre

Linden MacIntyre's bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award and his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Award. His second novel, The Bishop's Man, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award, among other honours. The third book in the loose-knit trilogy, Why Men Lie, was also a #1 bestseller as well as a Globe and Mail "Can't Miss" Book. 

His novels Punishment and The Only Cafe were also national bestsellers, as was his 2019 work of non-fiction, The Wake. A distinguished broadcast journalist, MacIntyre, who was born in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and grew up in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, spent twenty-four years as the co-host of the fifth estate. He has won ten Gemini awards for his work. MacIntyre lives in Toronto with his wife, CBC radio host and author Carol Off. They spend their summers in a Cape Breton village by the sea.

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