Christopher Nicholson is a writer, living in England. His latest novel, Winter, was published by Fourth Estate in January 2014. His two earlier novels are The Fattest Man In America (2005) and The Elephant Keeper (2009). The Elephant Keeper was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Encore Award. A serial adaptation was broadcast as a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'. He has two children, a son and a daughter. For the past twenty-five years he has lived in the countryside on the border between Wiltshire and Dorset.
Winter
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(Reprint)
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A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man in his eighties walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and Christopher Nicholson's fictionalized account of the final years of the accomplished writer's life is as engrossing as it is heartbreaking.
The novel focuses on the true events that occurred around the London theater dramatization of Hardy's acclaimed novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, including Hardy's hand-picked casting of the young, alluring Gertrude "Gertie" Bugler of The Hardy Players to play Tess. As plans for the play become more concrete, Hardy's interest in Gertie becomes a voyeuristic infatuation, causing him to write some of the best poems of his career. However, when Hardy's reclusive wife, Florence, catches wind of Hardy's desire for Gertie to take the London stage, a tangled web of jealously and missed opportunity ensnares all three characters-with devastating results.
Told from the perspectives of Hardy, Gertie, and Florence, Nicholson's novel perfectly captures the often-difficult juxtaposition of fledgling hopes and the unfulfilled life. With expert insight into the struggles of both Hardy and Florence, coupled with poetic yet unassuming prose, Winter is certainly on par with the novels of its central character.
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The New York Times Book Review - Thomas Mallon
…[Florence's] voice…is compelling and consistent…[Winter is] a strong addition to [Nicholson's] small, odd and distinguished oeuvre.The New York Times - Carmela Ciuraru
…[an] elegiac, beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss…Publishers Weekly
★ 10/19/2015Thomas Hardy fans will be engrossed by Nicholson’s fictional account of the true story of Hardy’s infatuation, at age 84, with a married 18-year-old amateur actress, Gertie Bugler, playing Tess in the local Corn Exchange production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. This disconcerting tale is told from three alternating standpoints: Hardy’s, Gertie’s, and that of Hardy’s second wife, Florence. Although the women’s narratives are credible and entertaining, Hardy’s perspective dominates and captivates through its slow rhythms, antiquated vocabulary, and above all its third-person style featuring natural imagery, meandering syntax, and melancholy observations. In classic Hardy fashion, the novel begins with a rural landscape, zeroes in on the silhouette of an old man walking with his dog, and then reveals that the dog is named Wessex and the old man is the great novelist. Even before Florence has her say, the strains on their marriage are evident, what with Hardy preoccupied by work, memories, and increasingly by Gertie. Hardy invites Gertie to tea when Florence is away, watches Gertie’s performance from backstage, keeps a lock of her hair, and imagines eloping. Gertie, meanwhile, imagines a London stage career, while Florence imagines widowhood. As in his two previous novels, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper) presents an impossible, inappropriate passion. This effort proves most remarkable for its deliciously archaic prose and portrait of the artist as an old man falling in love partly with a girl, partly with the disappearing countryside and lost youth she represents, and mostly with his own creation. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Winter"Christopher Nicholson's elegiac, beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy's life."
—Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times
"As should be evident, the complexly layered “Winter” is a book for grown-ups, one that finds the acme of human happiness in a young mother looking out at a starry winter’s night, while she holds her baby in her arms.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"Winter is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. it never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness."
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
"It is brave to set yourself up for comparison with an author as great as Hardy, but this poetic and unashamedly literary book is good enough not to be embarassed by the company it seeks to keep."
—Paul Dunn, The Times (UK)
"Hardy's story becomes a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness. Elegant, lyrical, and absorbing"—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"[Winter] is written in a prose of such quality that one does not notice the quality-to describe it as craftsmanlike doesn't do it justice. It is a prose beyond accomplishment, yet which refuses to astonish, and which is utterly appropriate."—The Guardian
"A gently elegiac tone permeates the novel, with its ravishing, appropriately Hardyesque sense of the intimate connection between landscape and emotion...a touching celebration of life over art."
—The Telegraph
“Nicholson succeeds in sounding very much like Hardy, with brilliantly realized landscape and settings.”
—Booklist
"Nicholson’s lyrical prose recalls Hardy’s own fascination with time and place while humanizing a literary figure known for his obsession with love.”
—World Literature Today
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-09-23Thomas Hardy's last love. In the winter of 1924, Hardy, 84, is living with his 45-year-old wife, Florence, and beloved dog, Wessex, in Dorchester. Their house has no electricity, and only with great difficulty has Florence managed to convince her husband to install a telephone. He feared, he said, that operators could listen in on their conversations. He refuses to have a car, although Florence offered to learn to drive. "He doesn't like anything new," Florence complains; "he would like the world to be as it was in eighteen fifty!" He is content to be isolated, in fact prefers it: Florence answers all his mail, declining interviews and invitations, while he retires to his chilly study and writes poetry. With tenderness and sympathy, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper, 2009, etc.) imagines the writer's reclusive final years and the brief glimmer of passion that enlivened them. A local acting troupe, mounting a play based on Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, has cast the lovely young Gertie Bugler in the title role. Hardy, who has long been following her career, is irresistibly attracted. Each man, he believes, has "an ideal though unattainable female spirit" that "moves freely from one woman to another"; that spirit, for him, resides in Gertie. When Florence sees poems apparently celebrating this new love, she falls apart. Like his deceased first wife, Hardy observes, Florence "read a poem as if it was a scientific tract" to be interpreted literally; he, though, recognizes that the woman he addresses is a "shape veiled by shadow or mist": like his fictional heroines, she is a figment of his imagination—but, nonetheless, a powerful inspiration. Florence's jealousy and despair propel the plot, but this fine novel reveals more than marital tensions: Hardy's story becomes a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness. Elegant, lyrical, and absorbing.