Benjamin Markovits' second novel takes place over the course of one year, shifting between uptown Manhattan and a private high school campus in Riverdale. Either Side of Winter moves through a series of linked events, love affairs 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 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, it achievement is to capture the city in a microcosm through a series of remarkable portraits.
