Winter Garden
Winter Garden is Kristin Hannah's 2010 novel, set partly in the Pacific Northwest of the early 2000s and partly in Leningrad during the German siege of 1941 to 1944. Meredith and Nina Whitson are sisters in their forties, the daughters of Evan, the warm-hearted manager of a small Washington apple orchard, and Anya, the cold, exacting Russian-born woman he brought home after the Second World War. The sisters have been raised on the careful conviction that their mother does not love them. When Evan dies of a sudden illness, his last request is that his wife finally tell their daughters, in full, the long Russian fairy tale she used to begin and never finish at their bedside. The story Anya tells, on the long late nights of an Alaskan cruise that the three of them take together, is the story of her own life: a young Leningrad poet's daughter, a marriage, two children, the Wehrmacht's encirclement of the city, and what she did to keep herself alive across the nine-hundred-day siege.
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What you might want to know about Winter Garden
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After their father Evan dies on his orchard in Washington State, estranged sisters Meredith and Nina Whitson are left with their cold Russian immigrant mother Anya.
Yes. The Russian frame narrative deals with the Siege of Leningrad, and the contemporary thread deals with grief and a fractured mother-daughter relationship.
The contemporary plot is fiction, but Hannah researched the Siege of Leningrad extensively and the historical sections draw on real testimony from survivors.
Winter Garden was written by Kristin Hannah, published in 2010 by St. Martin's Press.
Winter Garden is 448 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Winter Garden takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Winter Garden is a standalone novel by Kristin Hannah, not part of a series.
Winter Garden is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.