Winter's Tale

A huge, fire-breathing dragon of a novel...sheer joy! Vault into the cold, clar air across a frozen, fabulous time of love and laughter with Peter Lake, master thief, and his flying white horse Thunder toward the 21st Century, leading lunatics, lovers, rascals and dreamers over snowdrifts, through raging storms, furious battles, walls of ice and pillars of fire, to the golden city of our glorious future. Mr. Helprin writes like an angel.

"He creates tableaux of such beauty and clarity that the inner eye is stunned." - Publisher's Weekly
Mark Helprin's magical masterpiece will transport you to New York of the Belle Epoque, to a city clarified by a siege of unprecedented snows. One winter night, Peter Lake - master mechanic and master second-storey man - attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks it is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the affair between a middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying of consumption. It is a love so powerful that Peter Lake, a simple and uneducated man, will be driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
"This novel stretches the boundaries of contemporary literature. It is a gifted writer's love affair with the language." - Newsday
"Is it not astonishing that a work so rooted in fantasy, filled with narrative high jinks and comic flights, stands forth centrally as a moral discourse? It is indeed . . . . I find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance." - Front Page, The New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Bestseller
Educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, Mark Helprin served in the Israeli army, Israeli Air Force, and British Merchant Navy. He is the author of, among other titles, Refiner's Fire, Ellis Island and Other Stories, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, The Pacific and Other Stories, and Freddy and Fredericka.