More than a decade has passed since Canadian Anne Michaels’ first novel, Fugitive Pieces, became an international best seller and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. In her lyrical second novel, she continues to explore the themes of love, loss, and the human condition.
The Story: In 1964, newlyweds Avery and Jean temporarily settle into a houseboat on the Nile River. Avery, a British engineer, is set to begin work on the temple at Abu Simbel, an ancient shrine that must be relocated, stone by stone, to make way for the Aswan Dam. Jean, a Canadian botanist, revels in her new marriage and spends her days studying the diverse Egyptian foliage. But as Avery witnesses the displacement of native villagers, he starts to question his role in the dissolution of a way of life. Adding to his turmoil is an intensely personal disaster, one that sends the young couple down two very unexpected paths.
Knopf. 352 Pages. $25. ISBN: 0307270823
Denver Post
"Michaels takes the reader so deeply into her characters and their surrounds that it feels like knowing their souls. … The Winter Vault is gorgeous in its detail, its intimacy, its depth of character, and ultimately its characters’ paths to redemption." Robin Vidimos
Kansas City Star
"The Winter Vault is a densely packed repository. Read it for its scale of reference, its aching wisdom, its brutal beauty." Jeffrey Ann Goudie
Guardian (UK)
"Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty, and eloquently expresses her horror at human violence inflicted on the land and its inhabitants. Yet the novel’s emotional impact remains subdued, in part because Michaels at times allows her lessons—of botany, history, architecture—to overwhelm her story; and in part because of the abrupt narrative shift halfway through." Sylvia Brownrigg
San Francisco Chronicle
"Michaels, a Toronto teacher and poet, makes prose that feels wrought, every word serving a moral seriousness so intense as to broach a kind of sublimity. Like its predecessor, The Winter Vault reads quietly, but with breathtaking power." Joan Frank
Telegraph (UK)
"In the first part of the book poetic vision and narrative momentum combine to produce writing of dangerously beautiful intensity. … A flawed novel. … But magnificent, all the same." Jane Shilling
Seattle Times
"Jean and Avery are both ethereal and a little bland, rarely breathing. It’s not that Michaels can’t create vivid characters—Avery’s mother, Marina, jumps off the page—but that the book is about the ideas these people inspire and express, rather than the characters themselves." Moira Macdonald
Dallas Morning News
"How well readers like it will depend on their patience with character-driven cerebral fiction. … Winter Vault explores this notion of displacement and loss through the thoughts and conversations (monologues, really) that Jean and Avery exchange." Anne Morris
Critical Summary
Anne Michaels has published several acclaimed poetry collections, including The Weight of Oranges and Miner’s Pond. Her background as a poet shines through in The Winter Vault, which awed critics with its many elegant, vibrant, and luminous passages and Michaels’s endless curiosity about science, engineering, and architecture. Unfortunately, many of these same critics were conflicted in their overall reviews: they reluctantly felt hampered by rolling monologues, pedantic segments, uninspiring characters, and an awkward story structure. The San Francisco Chronicle even remarked: "[T]hese long recitations of memory and conjecture, while exquisite, grow exhausting." Overall, critics cited this latest from Michaels as a beautiful, important novel, but they were skeptical of its widespread appeal.