A Boy in Winter

A Boy in Winter takes the stuff of newspaper headlines and explores, in a taut, deeply moving narrative, the human passions behind it.
        
After Nancy Horvath and her eleven-year-old son, Danny, move into their dream house, Danny becomes fast friends with ten-year-old Eddie Nova, the boy next door. Eddie is a hyperactive, difficult child, both boon companion and bane of Danny's existence. Meanwhile, Nancy's helpful, neighborly relationship with Eddie's father, Frank, becomes a passionate affair. Frank is the partner Nancy wishes she had, and the father Danny has always longed for. Then one day, Eddie brings over a hunting bow and playfully aims it at Danny and his dog. In a tragic mishap, Danny accidentally shoots and kills his friend.
        
The novel traces the repercussions of that accident--in Nancy's voice, in Danny's voice, and from Frank's point of view. Danny's extraordinary account of the events that led up to the action is a heartbreaking, pitch-perfect record of the complications of love, the weight of isolation, and the ultimate opacity of intention and motivation. How Nancy's fierce, enduring love for her son sustains a future for him and how Frank's devastating loss and guilt play into that future provide drama-tic counterpoint to Danny's painful dissection of what he has done.
        
With stunning imagination and an almost sculptural elegance of storytelling, Maxine Cher-noff balances the radical shock of tragedy with the hard-won optimism of survival. She brilliantly enacts how a child stunned by grief and the adults who love him reclaim their trust in the future. Ultimately, A Boy in Winter testifies to the power of parental love and steadfast friendship to provide hope and faith in the face of tragedy.

Maxine Chernoff has won many awards for her ten books of poetry and fiction, including a Carl Sandburg Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and a Sun-Times/Friends of Literature Award. A Chicago native, she and her husband, the poet Paul Hoover, and their three children live in Northern California, where she teaches at San Francisco State University.