Fiction Review: The Winter Vault

The Guardian, UK (Review by Sylvia Brownrigg)

The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels, Bloomsbury

Lying next to one another on a bed in a woodland cabin, or in Jean's Toronto apartment, or on a houseboat along the Nile, Jean and Avery unspool stories of their childhoods, of their parents' meeting, of the deaths that have shaped them. Later, in Lucjan's studio flat, Jean will spend even more time simply listening, to the lacerating stories of a man and a people devastated by war.

The first, more emotionally involving half of the novel tells of Avery and Jean: their sweet courtship in and around Quebec; their move to the desert, where Avery is involved in the huge, extraordinary project of rescuing the temple at Abu Simbel from encroaching inundation; and finally the shocking stillbirth of the couple's baby girl. Michaels interweaves vividly textured scenes of Jean and Avery's life in the international community gathered around Abu Simbel with a moving account of an earlier water diversion project that, ironically, brought the two together - the building of the St Lawrence seaway, on which Avery also worked. He first discovered Jean, who knew the abandoned riverside communities as a child, mournfully walking along the drained Long Sault riverbed.

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