Winter Kept Us Warm

Thursday

March 14

7 PM

Anne Raeff

Winter Kept Us Warm

"Every word here feels set down with care and fierce conscience. The resulting narrative glows." --San Francisco Chronicle

A novel of rich details and landscapes, Winter Kept Us Warm follows three friends through six decades -- from postwar Berlin to Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles to contemporary Morocco. A twisting narrative reveals their mysteries in fragments, examining their long-ago love triangle and how it changed their lives forever.

"This novel is a profound success that manages to take its place in the canon of excellent war literature while also maintaining a kind of magical surreality . . . This is an astonishing read, a best-of, and a masterful treatise on enduring." --Lambda Literary

ANNE RAEFF's short story collection, The Jungle Around Us, won the 2015 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was a finalist for the California Book Award and named one of the 100 Best Books of 2016 by San Francisco Chronicle. Her stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica, among other places. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats.

"In many ways, this is a novel about absence--the absence of those most harmed by the war; the emotional absence felt inside relationships, romantic or otherwise . . . It is about the choices people slide into almost by accident that end up shaping their lives, and how this becomes clear only with the wisdom of hindsight. This kind of drama is quiet and subtle, but Raeff knows how to wield her words in this space, and makes small pronouncements devastating . . . These characters are in the thick of their lives, and Raeff shows us their fullness in quick sketches, the way a skilled artist may convey movement and attitude with only a few penciled lines." -- Los Angeles Times

"Every word here feels set down with care and fierce conscience. The resulting narrative glows as if distilled . . . Winter Kept Us Warm is deeply concerned with what makes a family, with inevitable, unanswerable loss, with the intricacies of language and time; love and war, friendship, the life of art and the imagination, and always (borrowing from Yeats) the quest of the 'pilgrim soul.' In other words, just about everything that ever mattered. The novel's own quest is one in which we can happily lose--and find--ourselves." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"The novel is a profound success that manages to take its place in the canon of excellent war literature while also maintaining a kind of magical surreality...At moments, the narrative even veers into Gabriel García Márquez territory with its mastery of human complications and conditions, its holiness of unrequited love...This is an astounding read, a best-of, and a masterful treatise on enduring." -- Lambda Literary

"Raeff writes brilliantly about characters that orbit each other for years on end, evolving and regressing in different corners of the world in ways that parallel their far-flung counterparts...In this author's nimble hands, the struggle for love, safety, and meaning feels palpable as the reader watches each character scour various routes toward those ends...Raeff's great achievement is having assembled a cast so recognizably flawed that it's easy to root empathetically for their contentment." -- Los Angeles Review of Books

"An ambitious, multi-generational tale." -- ZYZZYVA

"Raeff is a consummate storyteller, providing deep insight into her characters through her keen use of language and image. Depictions of places are similarly moving, both historically accurate and a vital part of the characters' story. Readers' emotions will run the gamut, rejoicing at quiet moments of happiness, and tearing up when tragedy strikes. These are characters--and choices--to think about long after finishing the last page." --Historical Novel Society

"Raeff creates a moving sense of the sweep of history." -- The Mercury News

"There's elegance, insight, tenderness, and craft aplenty in this pensive, melancholy story."-- Kirkus Reviews

"Raeff's ( The Jungle Around Us, 2016) meditative novel effectively conveys the enduring trauma of war, the conflicting desires for stability and escape, and the need to connect." -- Booklist

"Richly depicting emotional interiority of its characters, Raeff's novel reveals how the devastating effects of war and hidden secrets can impact lives across decades." -- Publishers Weekly

"From the first night that Ulli, Leo, and Isaac meet, in a bar in Berlin the winter after the war, the reader is absorbed in their history and their fate. Raeff writes with vivid assurance about Berlin, America, and Morocco, about men and women, about love and work. As the boundaries between characters shift, as past and present converge, Winter Kept Us Warm casts a dazzling spell. A wonderful novel." --Margot Livesey, author of Mercuryand Criminals

"A tale of an unusual love triangle spanning decades, Anne Raeff's Winter Kept Us Warm explores how war builds loyalties and tears them apart, how secrets destroy the best in us, and how a single lifetime isn't enough to make up for all we have lost. Beguiling, mesmerizing, touching, and smart, this novel will lure you back to page one to experience it all over again." --Michelle Hoover, author of Bottomland

"I loved this book. It's a book about history, about the world, about love and responsibility and being true--to others and to yourself--but like all good books it's really just about us, people, how hard it is to live, and how much joy there is in trying to. An astonishing and impressive book that illuminates and particularizes the twentieth century." --Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish

"Anne Raeff's extraordinary novel fills me with wonder: at the vivid textures of the different worlds she describes, whether it is a Moroccan wedding or a wintry Berlin apartment, at the complex emotional landscapes of her three main characters, and at the humanity and wisdom in her story. Through the flawed, deep love shared by Leo, Isaac, and Ulli, we learn of the pain of loss, the consolations of friendship, and the enduring, traumatic legacies of war. A haunting, indispensable novel." --Sylvia Brownrigg, author of Pages for Her