Poetry Shelf review

Posted: Thursday Aug 31, 2023

Laurence Fearnley’s Winter Time

Poetry Shelf review: Laurence Fearnley’s Winter Time | NZ Poetry Shelf

Laurence's Fearnley's novel, Winter Time, came out in 2022 but I missed it, in my year of sleeping blogs and slow paced reading. I am such a fan of Laurence's writing, I was thrilled to discover Winter Time's existence in the world. And the book is so good, so beautifully written and exquisitely paced, I wanted to let you know in case you have missed it too. I devoured it in two sittings, breathlessly, compulsively, saying to myself, this is what fiction can do.

Roland returns home to the Mackenzie Country to make sense of the unexpected death of his brother, haunted too by previous family deaths, impersonated on social media when he never uses social media, beleaguered by his brother's irksome neighbour, ruing the strained relations with his partner back in Sydney.

The novel is character rich, spiky, unexpected; these multi-dimensional figures draw you in so beautifully. They creep up on you, contribute to the engulfing mood, the traces of foreboding and tension, loss and grief, connection and disconnection. The detail is piquant, pitch perfect. The melody of the sentences so supremely judged. It feels like all the narrative roads lead to mood. To the way we inhabit our lives, navigating who we love and who we miss, what we have and what we long for. Place matters. The way memory both infects and nourishes. The way things change and things stay the same.

I adore this book, with its sublime settings and deeply engraved feeling. I simply adore this book.

Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. In 2014 her novel Reach was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and, in 2008, Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial Award and in 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019. She lives in Dunedin.