New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake–orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of … daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
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I re-read Winter’s Tale every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is an epic story covering New York over a century. Helprin’s writing is breathtakingly beautiful. Don’t read this book if you just like plots. There are plenty of plotlines in this book (hence each reading helps to weave them together), but the appeal of Helprin lies in …
This is the most beautiful thing I have ever read. It’s simply that.
I have added Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin to my favorite novels list along with David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, The Testament by John Grisham, and Home is the Sailor by Jorge Amado.
As you can read after that paragraph, I will be writing a favorable review of Winter’s Tale.
How could I not?
Winter’s Tale is a novel about early 20th …
Mark Helprin writes beautifully. I don’t mean he writes well, or that he’s a good, or even a great writer.
When I say beautifully, I mean he does with the English language what the Impressionists did with oil on canvas. When you read Helprin you are carried away by the story — until you’re stopped in your tracks by a sentence. A perfect …