The Dakota Winters

A Novel

By: Tom Barbash

Narrated by: Jim Meskimen

An evocative and wildly absorbing novel about the Winters, a family living in New York City’s famed Dakota apartment building in the year leading up to John Lennon’s assassination.

It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when 23-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy’s stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.

But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father’s professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a pause-resisting social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.

©2018 Tom Barbash (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

This one is in my top 5 for 2020

I loved it !
the narrator was excellent! the voices were not just different they were impersonations.

Loved this book!!

I absolutely loved this book. Perfect summer read. Great story, great writing. I highly recommend!

A Good listen

The story was interesting but a little anticlimactic. I expected more . I got tired of all the details towards the end and couldn't really keep up. I did enjoy the book and I visited New York during the time frame so that aspect was fun. The narrator was great!

Excellent! Very original!

Well written with a great mix of truth, fiction and a tender story of family and personal discovery.

The narrator was exceptional! Easy to listen to and really inhabited the story. He also did spot on accents and impersonations without being cheesy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I was hooked. i live in New York, the descriptions of places I could picture easily. I was a bit nostalgic.

Forgot that it is a work of fiction!

This one reads like a bio. So much that I forgot that much of this is not fact. It's very entertaining and I even had to google Buddy Winters just to make sure that there wasn't really such a person.

Good going, Tom Barbash. Loved it!!

Excellent, But....

I like historical fiction, and this book is wonderfully written, but the gap between history and fiction is too great. Worse than Forest Gump, which I wouldn't have thought possible. The research is obviously top-notch, and there is a lot of name-dropping, people and places and companies and bands, that provide context. The basic outline of John Lennon's life during the Dakota years is fairly accurate, but the author got too carried away with that aspect of the story. It felt more of a sacrilege than anything else. Otherwise, the book is excellent, as is the narration.

Wonderful reading,love John Lennon as a character

Such a delightful creative read i just purchased his other two books. If you lived through the 70s in MY you will get goosebumps.

Story was interesting but anticlimactic,

Book was anticlimactic, I guess because we all know what happens to John in the end. I loved the characters and I love John. Exactly how i would want to remember him. Good story just not dramatic enough I guess. Nice listen. Thank you

WAAAY more than expected

A bit of a domestic potboiler, and more about '80's and '90's east coast/NYC/show biz culture/privileged coming of age than about the Dakota per se - but that was totally OK by me. Includes a bunch of quasi-fictional/who-knows glimpses of Lennon's last months, but nothing soppy or prescient, and very little Yoko. May just be me, but thank you, Tom, for that.
Jim Meskimen gets two thumbs-up on voice acting: to my ear, he nailed every dialect and differentiated gender/age/geographic origin without sliding into stereotype or hyperbole.
This book had languished in my wish list for a couple months, but I pulled it out when I realized I hadn't listened for months to anything that didn't hinge on murder(s) or the obliteration of an entire world/species. Geez - time for something a little lighter, right?
Born before 1960? Give Dakota Winters a whirl for the nostalgia of life before cell phones, Twitter and the 24/7/365 news cycle and a brisk trot down Penny Lane.
Born afterwards? Listen, and be amazed that somehow, human kind has thus far prevailed, regardless.