Wintering - Hardcover

Amazingly moving and tender, as well as beautifully wrought - Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday Moses has recreated a life of compelling intensity, and some of the writing is wonderful ... the chapters set in Court Green, the Hughes's ancient manor in Devon, depict a fragile, unsustainable idyll: the descriptions of the garden with its daffodils and broad beans, and its orchards of apples destined to rot, are vividly evocative - Jessamy Calkin, Daily Telegraph Instead of carrying around the heavy facts of Plath's life and work, she has inhabited the poet, seeing through her eyes, using her language as easily as her own ... The strength of this book is its almost poetic distillation of reality. - Julie Morrice, Scotsman A must for Plath fans. - Big Issue Moses' Plath is brilliant, self-absorbed, pathologically jealous, inconsistent - except where her writing and her children are concerned. ...It is striking that so lyrical a novel can be so unsentimental about artistic production. ...WINTERING is a heroic tale about writing in the face of despair, about art as the most cunning weapon one can bring to a marriage. - Regina Marler, LA Times The strength of this book is its almost poetic distillation of reality. Moses creates inspired evocations of scenes from Plath's life, crystallising singular events into images that speak above their own weight... There is much to

The story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is one of the best-known, well-documented and controversial in the annals of poetry, romance and tragedy, yet the sequence of poems in Plath's volume Ariel, which seems to work inexorably towards her suicide, was rearranged for publication by Hughes. Using Plath's original order as a framework, this novel recreates her last months, beginning with her initial elation at moving from Devon to London following Hughes' departure and ending as she prepares optimistically for spring's rebirth. It is a searing story of resurrection, female power and hope, told with remarkable empathy and sensibility and bringing to life a woman of precious gifts.