Adult sisters Meredith and Nina Whitson couldn’t be less
alike. Meredith is the perfect daughter, the one who stayed near
home to enter the family business, learning the patient art of
raising apple trees from her father, using her own business sense
to expand the orchards’ sales from apples to grapes to local
handicrafts. Younger sister Nina, on the other hand, was all too
impatient to leave home. She is unpredictable and most often
absent, flying to war zones all over the world as a prize-winning
photojournalist. Reliable Meredith and passionate but unpredictable
Nina have a single bond: their devotion to their beloved father and
their shared distance from their emotionally cold mother.

But when their father suffers a serious heart attack and advises
his daughters on his deathbed to listen to their mother --- to
actually pay attention to the abstract fairy tales she’s been
trying to tell them since they were children --- the sisters are
skeptical. Nina doesn’t stick around to really hear her
mother’s stories, and Meredith fears her mother’s
frighteningly rapid mental decline, which she attributes to
senility but that the family doctor ascribes to grief.

The two sisters clash over how to deal with their mother: Nina
criticizes Meredith for quickly sending their mother to a nursing
home, while Meredith resents Nina for being thousands of miles away
during their family crisis. Without their father’s strong
presence, the glue holding the family together, they threaten to
split apart and leave their mother alone in their wake:
“Without her father, Meredith feared she would be like one of
those dormant apple trees: bare, vulnerable, exposed.” Both
are also experiencing crises in their romantic lives, struggles
that they can’t even discuss with each other, leaving them
feeling both angry and alone.

Anya, the girls’ mother, is largely a mystery, even before
her speech declines into seeming nonsense. Although she loves her
husband deeply, she has never connected with either of her
daughters. But when Nina finds herself drawn back to the
family’s farm, she encourages her mother to tell her stories
--- from start to finish --- and tries her best to draw a reluctant
Meredith into the story as well. Far from a mere fairy tale,
Anya’s story might hold the key not only to her elusive
personality but also to her family’s future well-being.

Anya’s fairy tales, rich in Russian folklore and history,
form the emotional core of WINTER GARDEN, as readers will find
themselves drawn into her stories and, like the feuding sisters,
come to understand the complex and profound background of a
character who is largely unknowable (and in many ways unlikable) at
the novel’s opening. Through the unfolding power of story,
readers come to know this character and to appreciate that family
relationships can be salvaged --- or forged in the first place ---
even in mid-life.

Although in many ways the situations and characters in WINTER
GARDEN are extremes, sisters and daughters of all ages will
recognize fundamental truths in Kristin Hannah’s keenly
observed portrayal of the Whitson family. This is the kind of book
that will be discussed fervently and fondly among book groups and
then passed hand to hand from sisters to mothers to daughters, all
of whom --- like the family in the novel --- will recognize and
appreciate the truth and power of a good story.