Either Side of Winter

'The young American writer Benjamin Markovits has established himself as a formidable voice ... grandiose, vaunting, impressive ... the bastard son of Philip Roth and A.S.Byatt.' Jonathan Headwood, New Statesman Benjamin Markovits' second novel takes place over the course of one year, shifting between uptown Manhattan and a private highschool campus in Riverdale. Either Side of Winter moves through a series of linked events and characters, season-by-season, in that richest of city-scapes. In Fall we see the tentative beginnings of an unlikely romance between new schoolteacher Amy Bostick and a wealthy, drifting former graduate, Charles Conway. In Winter we hear the story of her colleague Howard Peasbody, whose brief fling with college mate Annie Rosenblum, produced, as he now learns, seventeen years too late, a daughter Francesca the best friend of Rachel Krantz, whose relationships with her literature teacher, Stuart Englander, and her dying father Reuben, take us through Spring and Summer. Executed with exquisite sympathy, tenderness and emotional nuance, the four parts of Either Side of Winter come together to form a moving and elegiac picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance, community and a need to be loved. Touched by wry humour and the shades of Manhattan moods as we pass through the year, its achievement is to capture the city in microcosm through a series of remarkable portraits.