Winter Vault

Anne Michaels is one of Canada’s most prominent poets and prose writers, honored and nominated for numerous international awards. The Times calls her “the author of a unique and irresistible force.” Her books have become worldwide bestsellers, been adapted for film, and translated into 45 languages. Michaels’ third novel, When We Were Held, was among the finalists for the 2024 Booker Prize and Prix Femina Étranger, and it received the Giller Prize and the Prix Transfuge.

The acclaimed intellectual bestseller Wintering, written, as Sunday Telegraph notes, with “ominously beautiful intensity,” was included on the longlist for the International Dublin Literary Award (IMPACT) and on the shortlists for the Trillium and Giller Prizes, as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The story begins in 1964 in Egypt: an international team of specialists dismantles and relocates the ancient Temple of Abu Simbel, which faces flooding due to a reservoir on the Nile created during the construction of the High Aswan Dam. This is a place where “the future casts a shadow on the past,” where “regrets are not the end of the story; they are its middle,” where “love is … when you leave behind everything that was.” Here, Canadian engineer Avery and his young wife, Jean, “have to seize not the last chance, but the one that was missed,” trying to find their way back to each other because “you can’t draw a line between one kind of love and another,” and “in our memories there is more than we remember.”