A slightly different novel from MacIntyre's usual, but like all of them well worth the read. I particularly liked learning bit by bit of the various sides of all the characters.

An unlikely pair, Allan and Byron met in university and become friends. Allan is athletic and popular. Byron is studious and has a lame leg as a result of a childhood accident. After university Allan goes onto to become a successful businessman. Bryon becomes a lawyer and stays put in Nova Scotia to look after his mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Another thing the two men have in common is an attraction to the Winter sisters, Peggy in particular. Allan ends up marrying Peggy and Bryon marries her sister Annie.
Years later, the two old friends meet for a weekend of golfing. Allan suffers a massive stroke on the course. Allan can no longer run the business. It falls to Peggy and Annie the company’s accountant to sort things out which is when the secrets begin to come to the surface.
I enjoyed reading THE WINTER WIVES. The characters were engaging and the storyline was interesting. I think it would make a good book club pick.
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced digital edition of this book.

The latest Linden MacIntyre doesn't disappoint. Intriguing from the beginning right through the end, Winter Wives tells the story of two friends who marry sisters. How well do we really know our best friends, or our spouses for that matter? On the golf course, Allan suffers a stroke which starts his decline and Byron's reminiscences of not only their past, but the key event affecting Byron's life and choices.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was always interested in Canadian journalist, Linden McIntyre's involvement on CBC's Fifth Estate and so I decided it was high time I explore his literary pursuits. The Winter Wives begins with two Nova Scotian schoolboys making friends and also the two women( the Winter sisters) who follow them into adulthood.

This whole book left me underwhelmed. As readers, we are fed tidbits of things in the past to keep us engaged but I just was never really immersed in reading. The whole vehicle is the relationship between the two men and I guess one could say it wasn't always a pleasant place to be.

Publication Date 10/12/21
Goodreads review published 26/12/21

Included in "8 Novels by Prized Canadian Writers: From an intergenerational saga from Miriam Towes to new work from Métis author Katherena Vermette, we've got fall's best fiction from award-winning writers"

For me this book was a 3 out of 5, it wasn't great but it wasn't bad.

This book follows four main characters, none of which are overly likeable. The story jumps around a lot between characters and time periods and I found it hard to follow at times. Overall, the book was okay but I wouldn't classify it as a psychological thriller which was unfortunately the reason I chose to read it.

MacIntyre’s most recent novel is an odd one, and the problems start with the title, which seems increasingly peculiar as the narrative develops. The book focuses far less on the Winter sisters—Peggy and Annie—the “wives” of the title (who remain shadowy, flat characters throughout) than on the unlikely friendship between the men they marry. Byron, the narrator of the story, is an introverted rural Nova Scotian who attended high school with the sisters. He has a history of mostly buried emotional trauma and a physical handicap acquired as a result of a serious accident in childhood. His given name is Angus, but in high school Peggy nicknamed him for the Romantic poet because, like Byron, he limped. The moniker stuck. Though he ends up marrying the calm, practical Annie, the alluring Peggy is the one he carries a torch for. He assumes she’s just out of his league. When the two are at university, at Peggy’s request, Byron introduces her to his new friend, the handsome, charismatic Allan Chase, a gifted athlete from Toronto. (Allan had struck up a conversation with Byron one evening as the two waited for the dining hall to open, and the young men subsequently became inseparable, leading some to speculate they were gay.) Peggy eventually marries Allan for reasons that are never clear.

At the time of their casual first meeting, Allan leads Byron to believe that he’s attending the East Coast university on a football scholarship. As the story unfolds, we learn there are lot of other things Allan leads Byron—and any number of others—to believe. It becomes increasingly clear to the reader, if not to the rather dim Byron, that Allan is not who he says he is. He’s a shifty character who lacks a moral compass and thrives on risk. When Allan drops out of university to go on the road as a trucker, Byron, who’s determined to attend law school, keeps in touch, even visiting his pal in Toronto and observing one of Allan’s drug deliveries play out. Allan tells Byron that about 99% of the cargo he carries by truck is legal; the other 1%, not so much. Byron, who plays life cautiously, is relatively untroubled by his friend’s “business” activities. As he pursues a law degree, enters the legal profession, and deals with his widowed mother who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he has little time to keep track of Allan’s activities. A visit to Florida is clarifying, however: Allan appears to have entered the criminal big leagues, dealing with cartels and distributing illicit drugs across North America. He’s got the fancy digs and an art collection to prove he’s made it. Ultimately, he turns to real estate—actually a cover for some heavy-duty money laundering. Both the Winter sisters, who have become accountants, end up working for him. After seeing his law career falter, Byron joins Allan’s company as well. In fact, he’s named CEO and manages the legal aspects of the business, serving as signatory to deals whose details he chooses not to understand. Allan has indicated to that he wants his own name kept off the record, telling Byron: “I want you to be me.” Byron happily obliges. He’s always wanted to be Allan, or someone like him.

We wouldn’t have a novel, though, if trouble wasn’t brewing. At one point, the police start sniffing around, interested in a particular client and real estate transaction that Byron signed off on. He manages to put the cops off for a while, but his control of matters is more than slippery when Allan has a serious stroke on the golf course and is found to be succumbing to vascular dementia. There are a lot of secrets Allan has kept to himself. None of his three friends know the extent of his operations.

All of this provides quite a fascinating premise for a novel, and I found the book’s first two-thirds quite absorbing. However, it’s my impression that the author set up a situation he was unable to satisfactorily resolve. There’s a long stretch in the novel where no one seems to be who he represents himself to be. Add to this confusion yet another factor MacIntyre throws into the mix—that is, that Byron himself may have inherited early-onset Alzheimer’s from his mother. In the end, it all became a bit much for me, and I was entirely unconvinced and dissatisfied with the conclusion, which seemed ridiculously pat and underwhelming.

MacIntyre is a well-known Canadian investigative journalist who turned to novel writing in retirement. He received the prestigious Giller Prize for an earlier work of literary fiction, which I’ve not read. In fact, this is the first of his many novels I’ve got to, so I’m unable to say how it measures up to the works that came before. What I can state is that I was disappointed with this novel. <i><b>The Winter Wives</i></b> certainly had potential but lacked the quality I expected from MacIntyre.

I wish to thank the publisher and Net Galley for providing me with a digital copy of the novel for review purposes.

Rating: 2.5

Linden never disappoints with his writing and I love the east coast vibe.. When I read The Winter Wives I heard his voice in my head. I loved the descriptive words that gave a really good feel to the different locations and eras.

3.5 Stars

Lifelong friends since university, Byron and Allan are enjoying a game of golf when Allan has a stroke. Faced with his mortality, Allan decides he needs to make some decisions concerning his extensive business empire. He enlists the help of his wife, Peggy Winter; her sister and Byron’s wife, Annie Winter, who has served as his accountant; and Byron who has been his lawyer for many of his deals. At the same time, Byron is worried about showing the early signs of dementia which claimed his mother.

Byron, the narrator, admits that he and Allan are a “strange pair. Two guys who didn’t have a thing in common.” Their friendship seems unlikely. Allan is the wheeler-dealer who lives in Toronto. Byron tells his wife that, ‘’Allan is my oldest friend. I’d trust him with my life. But Allan is a criminal.” Byron, meanwhile, is a lawyer reluctant to move from his family homestead in rural Nova Scotia. Because of a traumatic childhood injury, he has been left with a limp and a faulty memory.

Neither Byron nor Allan is particularly likeable. Allan’s financial success has been built on drugs and money laundering; Byron is aware of his friend’s shady dealings and even facilitates them, though he keeps himself at a distance from day-to-day operations and chooses not to look too closely. Byron claims to have spent sleepless nights debating “the fine line between protecting and enabling,” before agreeing to work for Allan, but there is little evidence of an ethical struggle. He justifies his actions by arguing that “everything we do is compromised at some point. We survive by compromise, by moral flexibility." Then, any sympathy I felt for Byron is eradicated after an encounter between him and Peggy.

The book asks whether we can really know people: “Byron. Annie. Peggy. Allan. Always strangers to each other, always strangers to ourselves. Who are we?” Byron states, “People are inscrutable surfaces. They are social fabrications, concealing private lives that are unknowable.” Of course, some people make certain they are unknowable. Allan, for example, has a phobia about signing anything. He also used different names: “Allan had many names – inventions he could use when necessary then leave behind, as irrelevant as worn-out shoes. A name is a persona, he’d say, and a persona has no substance.” Peggy describes her husband as “a fiction, a creative enterprise that he’s been working on for decades.”

Byron thinks he knows Allan: “A name is only a name. Identity is something else, something deep and private, shared only with those who, over time, we come to trust. I took for granted that the list of people he trusted was very short. Me and Annie. And obviously, Peggy.” Byron tells Peggy that he knows “the Allan he’s always wanted me to know” but it becomes clear there is much he doesn’t know. A mystery in the novel is who Allan really is.

The book is being described as a thrilling psychological drama, but I didn’t find it especially thrilling. It is not fast paced enough to be a thrilling. I also did not find it to be as compelling a read as I had expected because I found it difficult to care about what happened to the characters. And the idea that people may not be what they seem is hardly original.

Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

When Allen is struck down by a debilitating stroke during a game of golf with his friend and business partner Byron, the relationship between the two begins to deteriorate. Life-long friends from college – each married to one of a pair of sisters – have to now come up with a plan to deconstruct their business empire built atop drugs and money-laundering while Allen is still cognitive enough to do so.

Byron is dealing with his own problems. Dementia, a disease that claimed the life of his mother several years earlier, is threatening to afflict Byron as well. Can Byron keep his wits about him in the face of mounting legal issues and an alleged conspiracy to oust him from the company he, Allen and the Winter Sisters built?

It has been nearly two years since my last run-in with Linden MacIntyre when I picked up his non-fiction book, THE WAKE – the story about a deadly tsunami that ravaged the coast of Newfoundland. I absolutely loved that one, so when I saw he had a new novel on the way, I jumped at the chance to read it.

McIntyre takes us through the current medical and legal upheaval affecting the lives of the four main characters, while also throwing in flashbacks to help to flesh out the story as the narrative moves along. It’s clear when Linden elects to jump around, so I was never lost or confused as to when a certain event was taking place. There were points where I had a hard time putting down the book as there were explosive allegations and moments where the action moved forward without time to take so much as a breath.

With all that said – there is a moment about three quarters of the way through the story that completely took me out of it. For the majority of the book, I really found myself identifying with Byron and his standoffish nature, his reluctance to move away from his homestead in Nova Scotia where he somewhat secluded himself from the real-world consequences and day-to-day operations of the company Allen and the Winter Sisters built. However, he does something so seemingly out of character and so repulsive that once it happens, I had a hard time getting back into the story. I more or less limped over the finish line to find out where everything lay when all the dust settled.

With THE WINTER WIVES, Linden doesn’t exactly make a case for any of the four leads being good people, although we get a pretty strong sense that Byron lives by a particular moral code that’s seemingly absent from the other three. Once that is broken however, I feel like I’m still being asked to perceive Byron the same way as the author continues to load piles of sympathy on him. But it feels wrong at this point. If the complexity of the narrative hadn’t been executed so strongly up to that point, I may have just wrote the whole thing off.

THE WINTER WIVES is essentially a strong, but ultimately flawed novel.

A psychological drama

This dialogue driven tale weaves multiple threads of crime, disability and dementia into a drama of unreciprocated love and misconception.

The main players:

Allan is successful financially
Byron is a lawyer with a lame leg who is taken care of his mother who has Alzheimer.
Peggy and Annie Winter: the two sisters who married them

The plot in a few words:

It all starts when Allan and Byron get together for a weekend of golfing. Out on the course Allan suffers a stroke and loses control of his life, a life built on lies and illegal drug trade. Byron has to confront his weaknesses as well as his strengths and his relationship with Allan, his wife and the one he thoughts was the love of his life....

My thoughts in a few words:

There is a lot going on in this moody drama from repressed memory, traumatic childhood injury to confused reality, to fakes names, abuse, consent and even suicide. The story is mainly told by the characters each their turn as they chit chat back and forth reliving their past and narrating the present.

The style is typical for this author richly written, taut and absorbing, smooth sailing in a steady pace from start to finish with some surprises we hardly see coming. It is also funny and poignant and at times shocking. Layered with love, deceit, friendship this story will leave us wondering if we truly know the people we have known the longest......

I was captivated by this story and enjoyed passing time reading it, although it may be a type of story that is not for everyone.

The Winter Wives is an intriguing, moody read. Author Linden MacIntyre sets us down in medias res — a round of golf with two old friends, we learn that their wives are sisters, one of the men collapses — and it takes the rest of the book to fill in just who these people are, how they met, what they do, what compelling circumstances led to that golf game...and what happens next. And even with all of these questions answered, the reader is still left wondering: can we really ever know another person, or for that matter, ourselves? I see that the publisher is calling this a “thrilling psychological drama”, and I don’t know if that quite captures what’s going on here — but as an examination of memory, relationships, lies, and losses, MacIntyre has written a compelling novel that left me with plenty to think on.