Winter's Tale (Paperback)

by Mark Helprin (Author) "THERE was a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently and was not deep, and the sky was swept..." (more)
Key Phrases: Peter Lake, Harry Penn, Short Tails (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The celebrated New York City epic appears for the first time in trade paperback in anticipation of publication of Helprin's new novel, Memoir from Antproof Case.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"This novel is imaginatively engaging as well as entertaining, and it will find an eager audience among adults and older adolescents alike," predicted LJ's reviewer quite accurately (LJ 8/83)?the book became a smash best seller. This magical story of the multiple lives of protagonist Peter Lake is now available in an oversized trade paper edition.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Harvest Books; First Edition. first thus edition (March 10, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156001942
• ISBN-13: 978-0156001946
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (201 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,023 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

219 of 234 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheer Insanity and Gorgeous Magic, August 17, 2000

By A Customer

Winter's Tale, a gorgeous masterpiece by master writer Mark Helprin is a book about the beauty and complexity inherent in the human soul, about God, love and justice and the power of dreams, those that take place while we sleep and those that we conceive while awake.

The story begins and ends with Peter Lake: orphan, master mechanic, and master second-storey man. One night Peter attempts to rob a fortresslike mansion in New York's Upper West Side. Although he believes the house to be empty, it is not. Beverly Penn, daughter of the owner is home. Home and dying, and thus begins a love affair between a middle-aged Irish burgler and a fatally-ill heiress.

A simple and uneducated man, Lake cannot understand the love in which he becomes so thoroughly entangled that he is driven "to stop time and bring back the dead."

Inbetween the story of Peter Lake and his quest to overcome death through the power of enduring love, Helprin shows us a magical view of a New York City that is, at times, so extraoridnarily real you think you are there, and at other times so magical you only wish you could be.

All of Helprin's protagonists, however, are not native New Yorkers and have come from elsewhere to seek their destiny, a fact that goes a long way towards helping those of us not familiar with the city feel that we have come to both know and love it.

Winter's Tale spans the entire twentieth century and we get a glimpse of everything from horse drawn carriages on cobbled streets to lunatics who rub elbows with sable-wrapped heiresses on Fifth Avenue.

Ignoring reality, Helprin's book is a glorious and ethereal melange of magic and insanity in which people are picked up by a wall of clouds that engulfs the city and then deposited in other times and other places. Although it can seem disjointed to someone not accustomed to this style, it is always a delight.

Helprin never fails to reward readers with one surprise after another: a village hidden on an island in a solid lake of ice where time stands still and the inhabitants do nothing but skate, ice-sail and star gaze, equipped with sparkling lanterns and mugs of hot-buttered rum; dead loved ones who are not really dead at all but simply living joyously in another time and place awaiting our own arrival; and a majestic white horse that can actually jump five city blocks at one time and help its rider to escape anything that happens to be in pursuit.

In Winter's Tale, anything that can happen, does happen, and while some of it is impossible, though still always glorious, much of it really is possible, though not quite probable. There is Beverly, who sleeps on the roof of her father's mansion, in the cold, winter air, in a specially-made bed of furs and canopies, watching the stars and defying the advent of death; there is Lake, himself, who makes his home in the rafters of Grand Central Station; there are midnight horse-drawn sleigh rides from the heart of New York City to the almost mythical Lake of the Coheeries which can only be found by the light of the moon across almost endless expanses of ice and snow; there are the clouds that drop a living man into the icy waters beside the Staten Island Ferry; and there are boats that simply vanish into an opaque, lightening-flickered fog bank, never to be seen again.

Winter's Tale, however, is fantasy and intense romanticism, not magic realism. But fantasy and intense romanticism are exactly what are called for in this fantastic and intensely romantic tale.

The protagonists of Winter's Tale all meet, lose contact with one another and then meet again as destinies cross, lose their way, and then double back to cross again.

Helprin drops many hints along the way that New York is heading for its Armageddon, a point where all good and evil will finally meet in one climactic moment and a golden light of peace, love and justice will usher in a new life for this glorious city. It could happen, and then again, maybe not, but Winter's Tale is certainly worth the trip to see.

Told in gorgeous prose throughout, Winter's Tale weaves an insanely magical tapestry of beauty and love that is both death-defying and life-affirming. After you read it, you will feel that it is something you could not have lived without.

67 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A standout on any top 10 books of all time list, May 19, 2000

By	M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

You will never be the same after reading A Winter's Tale. It's sheer lyric beauty and dazzling prose will stay with you long after you close the last page. You can feel the cold, you can imagine the lost world of New York, you can be totally absorbed by Helprin's magic realism of sorts as he transports you to an earlier time. No one who likes New York should miss this book. After rereading it recently, I realized that few books I have ever read hold together as well as this one, surely Helprin's masterpiece. Jack Finney's Time and Again is the only book that comes close to that turn of the century New York, but it's not nearly the work of genius that this is. Savor it and reread it every few years.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gives wings to all we believe true and good in this world., September 20, 1999

By	jp (USA) - See all my reviews

This is one of very few books I have read which leaves your head swimming from the power of the prose. It is remarkable to an amateur writer that someone could produce a work of this length, but that all the way through it you have to take a break to savor the words you are reading. This book is a fantasy, a century long painting that uses one of the most amazing backgrounds on earth - 20th century New York - to lovingly, sensuously showcase humans at their essences. Helprin gives wings to our basic wishes, longings, and to those issues at our cores that make us what we are - love, hope, hatred, greed, truth, deceit, despair, and finally courage and joy. Certainly, he caricatures each of these, but in a graceful and humorous way. I wished to go back to the turn of the century - to paddle around the waters of Peter Lake's origin, to fly up the frozen Hudson in a sleigh, to watch those with true courage against fools and cheats. I have re-read this book constantly - like the painting of the golden Gate Bridge - once finished, it's time to start again.