After the Winter

In Havana, Paris, and New York City, Claudio and Cecilia succumb to our implacable movement toward love.

Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss.

Publication date: September 4, 2018

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 264 pages

ISBN: 9781566895255

Translated from the Spanish

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Guadalupe Nettel was voted one of the thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine at the Bogotá Hay Festival in 2006. She has lived in Montreal and Paris and is now based in Mexico City. Her previous books include Natural Histories and The Body Where I Was Born.

Rosalind Harvey is an award-winning literary translator and a teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. She has worked on books by Guadalupe Nettel, Elvira Navarro, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Héctor Abad Faciolince, among others.

Longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award

“Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In After the Winter, Nettel has fashioned a powerful and luminous novel, one that portrays absence, presence and human imperfection with a unique and penetrating voice.”

—Ploughshares

“Previous relationships haunt the characters’ interior monologues, and woven into Nettel’s confident, empathic lines is the sad certainty that the author has explored in her other works: that life, let alone love, is fleeting.”

—The Atlantic

“Nettel’s mission is deeply personal and recognizably urgent.”

—The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Nettel brilliantly conveys the way things can go wrong at the beginning of a relationship and how those disasters can push us in unexpected directions.”

—Words Without Borders

“Brilliantly written.”

—Guernica

“A compassionately written portrait of urban loneliness and the human impulse to belong.”

—Kirkus

“In capturing the voices, travails, and eventual connection of two lonelyhearts, Guadalupe Nettel’s After the Winter captures the spirit of urban loneliness so vividly that it’s often painful to read.” 

—The Quarterly Conversation

“Nothing short of transcendent.”

—Three Percent

“Utterly brilliant.”

—Bookriot

“After the Winter asks big questions about intimacy and desire, happiness and depression, passion and numbness, and, of course, love and loss.”

—The Southwest Review

“In a tale of intertwining fates and the threads of interiority that connect the most disparate souls, Mexico City–based Guadalupe Nettel perfectly explicates the loneliness of expatriation as well as the gravity of a momentary meeting when one longs for love.”

—World Literature Today

“Nettel transfixes with this insightful and painfully poignant novel, which examines the bonds between people, the degrees of intimacy and commitment we allow ourselves and the toll isolation can take upon the soul.”

—The Glasgow Herald

“A wonderful reading experience.”

—Book Riot

“Guadalupe Nettel is a brilliant anatomist of love and perversity, and each new book is a revelation.”

—Katie Kitamura

“Guadalupe Nettel’s After the Winter is a dazzling excavation of the glimmering particularities of consciousness, and how a collision of fates can transform our inner worlds. This taut, atmospheric novel is an ode to the complicated heartbreak of loving what will forever be just out of reach.”

—Laura van den Berg

“After the Winter is a deeply compassionate story about love, about how hard it is to know another—let alone ourselves—in all our strange glory. Yet, in the end, it is also a story about how essential it is, in spite of the pitfalls, to try.”

—Nick Flynn