Inverno

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.

Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.

Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park, in a snowstorm, for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant-now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of the heart.

How does love make and unmake a life? This startling and brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, the author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startlingly true.