Winter Garden

Winter Garden is a novel by the American writer Kristin Hannah, published in 2010.

The fairy tale in the title is the only connection the sisters had with their mother when they were children, and the novel's structure turns on the difference between a story and a confession: what Anya has been telling them at bedtime is a version of her own life, and the promise her husband extracts from his family makes her finish it. The book moves between the sisters' present, with an orchard to run and a marriage each of them is handling differently, and Anya's past, which reaches back to Russia and to the war, and Hannah keeps the two in balance so that the daughters' complaints look smaller as the mother's history comes into focus. The orchard supplies the calendar for the present-day chapters, since fruit cannot wait for anybody's family crisis, and the work does as much as the dialogue to explain how Meredith became the person she is. Hannah had already written several bestsellers about families in the Pacific Northwest, including Firefly Lane and True Colors, and this novel is one of the group in which she moved further back in time than her earlier books allowed.