Winter Journey Horror Book Review

From the best-selling author of The Shooting Party, a contemporary tale of sibling rivalry and reconciliation, and of the hopes and discoveries of mature middle age His wild years at last behind him, Alfred Ashby, a celebrated photographer now in his late fifties, has returned to where he was raised, the family farm in rural England. The old house in the valley, little changed by the years, provides him an agreeable darkroom, necessary solitude, and a link to a more tranquil past. His reverie is broken by a January visit from his older sister, Edith, a former Member of Parliament and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her Alfred’s bachelor life is undesirable, his appearance careless, his current work-a series of manipulated images of his late lover, Lydia-obsessive and disturbing. She has plans for Alfred, for the farm and for the future, plans she hopes will help the two of them mend their frayed relationship and forget their past sorrows, past mistakes. Published in the UK to great acclaim, Winter Journey is Isabel Colegate’s first new book to appear in America in nearly a decade. The London Times called it “a sonorous, muted masterpiece,” a book whose intelligence shines through the page like the bright winter sun, illuminating these characters and the turbulent histories that have shaped them. “I suppose you might say it’s a novel about Britain,” said the Financial Times. “On a simpler level it’s about a brother and a sister, and it reads true.”