The Winter Wives, Linden MacIntyre
The Winter Wives, Linden MacIntyre
List: $25.95 | Sale: $18.16
Club: $12.97

The Winter Wives

Author: Linden MacIntyre

Narrator: Greg Campbell

Unabridged: 7 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/10/2021


Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
A thrilling new psychological drama from Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Linden MacIntrye, weaving threads of crime, disability and dementia together into a tale of unrequited love and delusion.

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.

About The Author

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Krista on April 07, 2021

I knew the Winter sisters from high school. We moved in different circles at university, but I’d see one or both from time to time and, like everybody else, they seemed to be intrigued by my apparent friendship with the Great Chase. If I could have seen the future, it wouldn’t have surprised me t......more

Goodreads review by Brandon on August 05, 2021

When Allen is struck down by a debilitating stroke during a game of golf with his friend and business partner Byron, the relationship between the two begins to deteriorate.  Life-long friends from college – each married to one of a pair of sisters – have to now come up with a plan to deconstruct the......more

Goodreads review by ❀ Susan on December 19, 2022

Winter wives came my way through my secret sender, an annual book gifting endeavour that we enjoy in our Canadian Content group. Once I picked it up, it was hard to put down. It is not an overly dramatic book but slowly builds up the intrigue as the reader gets to know the characters… or does the re......more

Goodreads review by Kathy on September 06, 2021

I didn't mind this book, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to people. The characters have a very bizarre relationship that never really made sense to me. It didn't seem to be going anywhere for the first half, and then it got interesting, and then it kind of fizzled out.......more

Goodreads review by Dana on September 13, 2021

This was my first book by Linden MacIntyre. I really enjoyed his writing style and the layout of the book. It was easy to follow. I didn't find myself connecting with any of the characters but was still invested in the storyline. I didn't get the "thrilling psychological drama" aspect. I found this t......more


Quotes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Like all the other characters in this novel, the reader is also drawn into the wake of the enigmatic, Gatsby-like Allan Chase. Poignant, funny, at times shocking, The Winter Wives is a story about the hazards of memory, with a cracking great mystery at its heart.”
—Gil Adamson, author of The Ridgerunner and The Outlander

The Winter Wives tells a deceptively quiet story about friendship and secrets, which gradually reveals itself to be a gorgeous meditation on whether we can ever truly know the people we've loved the longest and the most.”
—Lynn Coady, author of Watching You Without Me and Hellgoing

“Taut and absorbing, The Winter Wives is a layered story of love, deceit, friendship and identity. It is also a new kind of thriller, where dementia raises its head, and memory itself becomes a sly antagonist. Byron must navigate not only life-long romance and betrayal—but the hard knot that is his own complex mind. An elegant and fascinating book.”
—Shaena Lambert, author of Petra and Radiance

“Longtime journalist MacIntyre . . . writes with an easy command of both the external world . . . and the internal world of complex and frequently conflicted characters. . . . The Winter Wives [is] a powerful, thought-provoking read.”
Toronto Star