The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels
The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels
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The Winter Vault

Author: Anne Michaels

Narrator: Karen White

Unabridged: 10 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/04/2009

Synopsis

In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settle into a houseboat on the Nile just below Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling and reconstruction of the temple, a "machine-worshipper" who is nonetheless sensitive to their destructive power. Jean is a botanist by vocation, passionately interested in everything that grows. They met on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, witnessing the construction of the Seaway as it swallowed towns, homes, and lives. Now, at the edge of another world about to be inundated, they create their own world, exchanging "the innocent memories we don't know we hold until given the gift of the eagerness of another."

But when tragedy strikes, they return to separate lives in Toronto: Avery to school to study architecture; and Jean into the orbit of Lucjan, a Polish émigré artist whose haunting tales of occupied Warsaw pull her further from Avery but offer her the chance to assume her most essential life.

Stunning in its explorations of both the physical and emotional worlds of its characters, intensely moving and lyrical, The Winter Vault is a radiant work of fiction.

About Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels is the author of the award-winning international bestseller Fugitive Pieces, now a major motion picture. It won the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Award, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Michaels is also the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections, including The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet

I have tremendous admiration for Anne Michaels’ courage and ambition. She composes her novels as though she believes she has a place beside the very best novelists in history. I suppose though you could also use an argument of hubris against her. Her insistence on the poetry of life can be exhaustin......more

Goodreads review by Katie

While reading this I was aware that there's a line where profundity and pretension begin blurring into each other. It's a very subjectively drawn line, no less subjective I suppose than the varying criteria we all have for evaluating what we read. At the final count though, Anne Michaels won me over......more

Goodreads review by Gemma

The Winter Vault tells the story of an engineer and his young wife. It begins in 1964 with their life in the desert where Avery, the husband, is involved in the piece by piece removal of a temple threatened by the rising water levels caused by a recently constructed dam. The traumatising pivot of th......more

Goodreads review by Joselito Honestly

This one is special. To demonstrate, let me IGNORE the best parts, those where I had to stop, catch my breath, close my eyes for fear that the words are already blinding me while feeling "the blow, the disaster to a soul... caused by beauty." Allow me, instead, to maybe just pick a brief scene where......more

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