The Winter Wives

By: Linden MacIntyre

Narrated by: Greg Campbell

Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

National Best Seller

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.

©2021 Linden MacIntyre (P)2021 Random House Canada

Critic reviews

National Best Seller

"Like all 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)

Problematic narration

I had a hard time getting into the story because of the narration. You can hear frequent intakes of breath. The narrator doesn't have much of a repertoire of voices to draw on, so the characters sound alike. The delivery is also choppy with many passages or dialogue rushed. If you are interested in this story, I'd suggest reading rather than listening.