"Don't take your eyes of this writer ... (After the Winter is) a book that creates a disturbing and terrifying effect on the reader, almost like a walk on a rainy day in a graveyard" --Carlos Zan n, El PaYs
No ordinary love story, After the Winter is as subtly strange and moving as anything Nettel has written.
A shy young Mexican woman moves to Paris to study literature. Cecilia has few friends, and a morbid fascination with watching the funerals taking place in the cemetery outside her apartment. She strikes up a close platonic relationship with her neighbor, a sickly young man who shares her interest in death. After coming to entirely depend on him for company and routine, Cecilia is devastated by his decision to go to Sicily for his health, and is left alone in an unfriendly city once more. Claudio, meanwhile, lives in New York with the submissive, quiet, very wealthy Ruth. She makes few demands of him, while acquiescing to all his desires and indulging his obsessive, misogynistic nature. He meets Cecilia by chance while visiting a friend in Paris and these two very different lives collide with transformative consequences.
In her novels and stories, Guadalupe Nettel established herself an astute observer of human nature--our eccentricities, phobias, neuroses, and deviances. Now, in her new novel, After the Winter, she turns a shrewd eye to human relationships and examines the possibility of love between two flawed and troubled individuals.
