A daring heartbreaking novel Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass might
have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow.
After a little time had passed she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was
entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come she would be in a different story than
the one she had imagined but it was possible she knew to imagine anything. Inverno is a love
story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline waiting in Central
Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring yards from where thirty years ago Alastair as a
boy hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years
flash by in an instant-now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale now stranded anew in
childhood with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of
the heart. How does love make and unmake a life? This startling and brilliantly original novel
by Cynthia Zarin the author of An Enlarged Heart is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the
present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights
Inverno is miraculous and startlingly true.
